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Comment by deskr | Hacker News Reader

I love it. It might be "old fashioned" but it's the devil you know and it ain't bad and it's very readable.

> and it's very readable

No it's not. Computer Modern is way to thin to be considered readable. This is because it was originally designed with print in mind, which used to have ink bleeding, making thin lines thicker on paper.

The Computer Modern font was designed to incorporate a "blackness" variable that controlled the thickness of its strokes. This provided a way to adjust the design for different printing processes and to accommodate, for example, ink swell or the lack thereof on modern printing devices.

Here are some scans by Raph Levien showing the vector design vs. the offset printing in Knuth’s Digital Typography vs. laser printing:

https://levien.com/type/cmr/gain.html

Presumably, the middle version is how Knuth wanted the font to appear on the page. But the bottom version is what we get when we take the digital outlines and render them on a laser printer.

Fortunately for us, several people have used the adjustable-blackness feature to make blacker renditions of Computer Modern that are designed to look good when laser printed.

MLModern is the one I prefer:

> MLModern is a text and math font family with (La)TeX support, based on the design of Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern and the Latin Modern project. It avoids the spindliness of most other Type 1 versions of Computer Modern.

For a typeset example of it in use: https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-2024060...

MLModern looks much better. I wish they would replace CModern with this as the default font.

Does it include ports of the AMS packages with extra symbols?

If only there were some way to adjust for that difference when viewed on a different type of medium, such as a high-DPI LED-backlit liquid crystal display.

Unfortunately, the web wasn't designed that way, which is why every document that you read on a website instead of on paper is illegible.

It's a shame, really. :) /s

I love it too. Very readable, very focused, no distractions. I like it so much more than all those soulless "modern" web 2.0 (or whatever) style clones. This LaTeX look is like a great suit.

Agreed, but I'd go with a great lab coat :)

On the other hand, the reflowing/small screen readability story of LaTeX is a very sad one, and no typesetting will be able to taper over that for me in 2024. Even scientists use smartphones.

I don't doubt it or that it's extremely useful and mostly well-designed. I just wish its font rendering had a bit more meat on its bones.

I've never had to use it, so I don't know how it works at all (besides understanding that it's a marked-up file processing pipeline), so I'll ask: is there something deeply problematic with its font rendering tech that it has been like this for soooo long?

I mean, I can spot one of its PDFs from a mile away.

I don't know much about typesetting, but I always thought it was quite the opposite, Latex is a proper typesetting system for professional physical printing. It's actually almost everything else that looks "wrong" (besides things like InDesign).

I think it might also be because many things like browsers or MS Word have to use crude, fast algorithms for typesetting, but Latex uses complicated and slow, but much more accurate algorithms for that.

It's like if you compare a printed Word document vs. a printed Latex document it becomes very obvious. Latex looks like a newspaper or magazine, because that's just how printed text is actually supposed to look like.

Thanks for that, it makes sense.

The meat on the bones is the support for ink behaviour when using offset printing, as mentioned by sibling comments.

You need different parameters for different display/printing mechanisms

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