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Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

Just no. CM font was made for printing. It was last updated in 1992, before PDF was even a thing. CM is not made for screens and it is a horrible idea to use it on the Web.

> It's so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern.

It's more like "undergrad students use it in their papers because they don't know better". The only Computer Science publications I'm aware of that still use CM are the Springer LNCS/LNAI series. Which also happen to still use a template optimized for printing the proceedings as books. And AFAIK, these templates are universally hated and considered archaic and outdated: They look bad everywhere (screen, A4 printout, letter printout) except the Springer-printed paper volume.

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Always the same objections, from the same people, when it comes to CM.

It's mostly just subjective nowadays, just like your whole 'argument'.

I think it looks great on high res displays, which should cover a huge chunk of all consumer displays used today.

World wide the most used screen resolution is 1920x1080 at ~9% all other top resolutions is somewhere around 720p [1]. Even on desktop computers the top resolutions is 1920x1080 at ~21% followed by 1366x768 also at ~21% [2]. I still only use 1080p screens due to superior performance in games, refresh rate, battery life and that you don't have to deal with scaling issues. Things have changed since I bought them three years ago, but I don't need to upgrade.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

I can only offer my opinion and an image. I think CM looks terrible on dark backgrounds: https://0x0.st/-M8w.png

(This is with the Dark Reader extension in Dynamic mode with these settings: https://0x0.st/-M8g.png)

Computer Modern is the "plaid shorts" of TeX fonts. I profoundly admire all of Don Knuth's efforts, and I've had the pleasure of a number of conversations with him. He threw in the towel himself, recognizing that artists could design better fonts than computers.

To excel at math requires focus. When I see Computer Modern I see an author who didn't get distracted choosing a better font. Not just undergraduates.

It's good that he threw in the towel. It takes a bit of a galaxy brain perspective to conclude that by being amateurish in his approach to font implementation with TeX/Metafont, Knuth was somehow being a more professional mathematician.

We need to accept that Knuth was an amateur type designer who was genuinely preoccupied with fonts (“I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu.” — Donald Knuth https://twitter.com/TeXtip/status/1389329788628783104). He could have delegated the design of the first font for his TeX system to a professional type designer. He didn't.

> He could have delegated the design of the first font for his TeX system to a professional type designer.

Knuth started work on TeX's fonts about the same time that he began work on TeX and Metafont (1977-78). CM was largely completed by about 1984-86. He was a computer science professor. I'm not aware of any funding he procured to develop TeX. You're saying he had the financial resources to hire a professional type designer for fonts for an academic publishing system of unknown future?

CM isn't good for the web, but it is pleasing in print IMO.

I do agree though it has been abused a lot as a status symbol. Back at MIT, having a resume in CM spoke "I come from a science/engineering background" right off the bat, while having a resume in a Microsoft font spoke "I go to the business school".

If you move away from CM, great, there are lots of better web-friendly fonts, but don't go to TNR for f*ck's sake. TNR is awful. Unfortunately some publications have gone down this hole.

I like Crimson Pro of late. It looks VERY pleasing on mobile LCD/LED and e-Ink screens, has the effect of making your device feel like a quality printed book, and has a full selection of weights.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Crimson+Pro

If I see a resume in CM I know that person will be back in grad school before I can finish onboarding them.

> Just no. CM font was made for printing. It was last updated in 1992, before PDF was even a thing. CM is not made for screens and it is a horrible idea to use it on the Web.

The same can be said about P.D.F. files.

I recently found out why so often when copying from them, spaces are either inserted doubly, or removed: the reason is that the format has no understanding of spaces, only of distance between characters and is completely about præsentation, lacking semantics in any way.

When copying, the reader simply applies a heuristic of what distance between characters constitutes a space, and is often wrong.

The format understands spaces just fine. The problem is that programs that produce PDFs are often designed just to make the PDF look correct, without any care for semantics.

I think there's just a bunch of history here--print is the use case that you really want PDF to get correct, and so you take existing print pipelines which discard semantics and add PDF as a new backend. This is the easy/lazy way to get PDF working, and there are also tons of PDF pipelines are just stapled onto the end of a print pipeline as if PDF were another type of printer.

You'll see a night and day difference between one of those pipelines and something more suited to processing a document with semantics, like FrameMaker. FrameMaker seems to be a bit more niche now that print documentation is less mainstream.

I can understand why the PDF ecosystem is a bit frustrating, but I still prefer it when I'm reading academic papers explaining some algorithm or mathematical concept.

> The problem is that programs that produce PDFs are often designed just to make the PDF look correct, without any care for semantics.

When the alternative is that they don't offer a non-proprietary export format at all, I'll take it. Even a poor PDF output is better for data portability than having your data forever trapped in a proprietary platform that can disappear or get discontinued at any time without a migration path.

It is not the case that treatment of spaces is completely wild and ad hoc. PDF can, and frequently does, contain the text itself along with the display of said text. This is why applications like pdftotext can often give you correct plaintext output.

OCR applications are able to make PDFs from scanned images accessible and searchable (and with the right spaces) precisely because they embed their output into that layer of the PDF meant for the text itself, not its presentation.

Actually what OCR programs do is a very clever hack. PDF is mostly just a way to describe how to render pages, and just like with any rendering frame work that can involve a bitmap, a set of stroke and fill commands, or some text rendering. A scanned document obviously is just a huge bitmap, but if you can identify the text, and can define a font that doesn’t draw anything, then you can add instructions to the PDF to render that text in that font and as long as you can specify character positions everything will line up nicely.

If you are generating a PDF with text you can render a string with spaces and let the glyph layout sort it out, or render individual characters, or draw those characters by hand and use the invisible font trick (because your font is not licensed for embedding). It’s not that you’re using different conceptual layers of the PDF, you’re just choosing how to render your content.

PDF is simply the lowest common denominator of what counts as "computerized sheaf of paper, with a layout and appearance that won't shift over time, no matter which reader software you use". It has its value, especially with preservation of pre-digital documents.

Accepting a potentially inferior machine-readable plaintext when copy and pasting is the price we pay for having something like that available.

I'm one of those undergrad students :-) What are the better, more current, ways of prepare, say, a thesis document with maths, pictures ?

Springer's sample document for monographs^1 and books contains

    \usepackage{newtxtext}
    \usepackage{newtxmath}

for font setup.

1. https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1...

TBF, I was one too :-)

FWIW, for non-math, single column text, LuaLaTeX + plex-otf [1] is my current favourite combo. Reads well both on screen and on paper. But if you are heavy on math, you will need to setup a second font to replace CM in the math formulas. You can also scout the top conferences/journals in your niche (i.e. where your prof. publishes) and pick a template you like. The templates are typically linked with every CfP, and you can expect that they will have worked-out the common cases for their field.

[1] https://ctan.org/pkg/plex-otf

I'm using the following for fonts.

  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage[largesc]{newpxtext}
  \usepackage{newpxmath}
  \usepackage[supsfam=newpx]{superiors}

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