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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Garamond is a fine font, but using Garamond Italic should be banned by law. I scream internally when I see it and how the different letters don't match visually. Printed books using Garamond Italic are the worst.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=garamond+italic&iax=images&ia=imag...

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I disagree. I love that Garamond italic is not a slightly cleaned-up oblique version of the Roman font, but an entirely different font of its own. I wish more typefaces would do that.

In stately Garamond text, the italic stands out, which helps it fulfill its use in emphasis. However, I agree that because of this heightened visibility, its use should be limited to where it's truly needed. It's sort of like chili powder: used wisely, it enhances; used excessively, and it draws too much attention to itself.

I had to write dozens of long technical documents for a company that used Garamond as their standard font.

Except that the guy who designed the templates used a Mac and had no idea how bad the Garamond font looks on Windows.

The italic especially made my eyes bleed.

My solution when I couldn’t take it any more was to use an Adobe Garamond font and embed it in the document…

The Harry Potter books in many countries are all set in Adobe Garamond and the italic really makes the spells stand out in a spiky, sizzly, and slightly sinister way that works well.

Interesting, thanks.

Oh man, that is awful -- you weren't kidding.

I don't know what's wrong with plain ol' Computer Modern (as TeX uses by default).

Computer Modern is IMO way too thin and has huge, pointy serifs. I like Palatino (Latex: mathpazo) best, but Garamond - a similar style - is fine, too.

Have you tried Charter?

Charter seems OK, the thickness variation seems somehow strange to me (couldn't decide whether to vary it or not?), but I like that it doesn't vary thickness quite as much as Palatino on numeric digits.

For TeX typesetting Utopia (and derivatives like Fourier and Erewhon) is also good if you want something that was designed for book (not journal or newspaper) body text but has a less mediaeval feel (and more Cyrillic, sigh).

Computer Modern looks terrible on computers (ironically!). It's only tolerable on relatively high-DPI printed documents which are capable of rendering the intricate, narrow parts of the legends. I wish people would stop using it for digitally distributed PDFs.

I think Computer Modern looks fantastic digitally (even on a 110ppi screen), and lends an air of seriousness to the text.

I agree with this. I've never really seen it as objectionable.

I can't help but wonder if that's subconsciously learnt by association of the typeface with (La)TeX and academia rather than based on the sole merits of Computer Modern itself. If we're just looking at the typography, Computer Modern is quite average and its screen legibility is horrible (vertical strokes are way too thin).

Exposure to Computer Modern primarily via PDFs in the late 1990s-early 2000s was the reason I became interested in learning what produced such documents in the first place; I don't remember how, but it wasn't hard to learn about TeX after that.

The outstanding quality of Computer Modern even on the low-res screens of those days is what appealed to me (to be fair, TeX's ability to produce professional-quality kerning, hyphenation, line density, et al, also contributed). I fell in love with it even before I knew what TeX was.

Computer Modern is too thin for laser printers and uncomfortable on computers screens (low or hi-DPI). I feel it less readable than Garamond for French publications.

IIRC Garamond looks great when set by TeX.

The worst offender is Monotype Garamond -- not all Garamond/Garalde/Aldine faces have such oddball italics. That italic isn't even based on a historical Garamond; it's based on a related face by Jean Jannon, which is part of the reason it doesn't match.

> I scream internally when I see it and how the different letters don't match visually.

What's wrong with it? You mean stuff like the vertical part of "j" and "p" having slightly different angles?

Most letters look like at 20% angle, while a few others at 10% angle. Compare uppercase I vs lowecase t. Also m and a few others.

Perhaps we need an expert on design history. Typefaces are a complex thing with lot's of design decisions behind.

Not the OP, but I can see why they don't like it. Just looking at "Garamond Italic" written in Garamond Italic, the "m" jumps out for having a completely different angle to its surrounding letters in the word (apart from the "n", which is similarly super-slanted. The effect of going between the angles of "I" and "t" is similarly offensive.

Do you recommend a font similar to Garamond with better congruence between the regular serif and italic?

Ehrhardt [1] is a personal favorite of mine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrhardt_(typeface)

Those are terrible!

@enricozb, below, posted a much better Garamond Italic:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond#standard-style...

Georgia does italics better and is more widely available

I think Georgia is highly underrated.

Good lord. Is there a reason it's like that, or is it simply extremely poorly-made? That looks like a not-very-good machine learning algorithm tried to make a font variant.

Whether designed by Garamond, Jannon or someone else, Garamonds share a few central characteristics. Their serifs — the little extra strokes on letters like “i” and “r” — are often sloped or slightly scooped. They have low “x-heights” — that’s the height of a lowercase letter like “e,” “a” and, obviously, “x” — and high crossbars, or horizontal strokes, on letters like “e.” Garamond’s strokes are widely varied and full of character — they were originally made, after all, to resemble handwriting. The italics tend to reveal some of their most idiosyncratic strokes, such as the loop on a lowercase “k,” or the upward flick at the bottom of a lowercase “h.”

- from the article

Thanks, that illuminates some of it, but the main thing that stood out to me was the extreme differences in slant on some letters. Those simply look like (very obvious) mistakes—but surely aren't? That aspect doesn't really make it look more like handwriting, to me, but kinda ransom-lettery.

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