What's new in TeX, part 1

Posted Sep 21, 2015 11:51 UTC (Mon) by marcel.oliver (subscriber, #5441)
In reply to: What's new in TeX, part 1 by butlerm
Parent article: What's new in TeX, part 1

I only half agree with this comment. I remember that I considered CM "oldfashioned" when I first started to use TeX about 25 years ago and tried various other font options from time to time. Most of these experiments I abandoned rather quickly.

When doing mainly plain text, there are actually a lot of good and more "modern" options, whatever that means. However, when it comes to typsetting math, it is very hard to compete with CM for two reasons: First, CM is incredibly well done for writing mathematics, as you can see in comparisons like

https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/hartke/hartke.pdf

http://maverick.inria.fr/~Nicolas.Holzschuch/texmath.html

I think to some extent it comes down to having an italics font which is visually very distinct from the upright shape so that the visual parsing of mathematics is easy on the eye. Then big symbols like sums, integrals, and big parentheses are sufficiently large without being very black, so they don't stick out from the page but rather blend in well with the entire formula. Finally, the font metrics are done well and produce well-balanced output.

As second issue when writing professional mathematics is the availability of special symbols beyond the core symbol set, where a lot of the available ones are visually compatible with CM and stick out when used with other math fonts. Here other fonts have caught up in recent years, but the set of CM-compatible symbol fonts is still larger and more readily available than anything else.

So I think a lot of the "professionally produced math and science books" will fall into the category "text with math" rather than "mathematical writing". I probably would not use CM for an introductory Calculus textbook (although this could also be done well!), but if you look at the mathematical research literature, there is a lot of very good publishing in CM, and it seems to me the trend is more toward CM than away from it.

A lot of what you may perceive as a difference between professional and amateur publishing is due to poor document classes, I believe. (And of course poor copy-editing.) Especially if you go beyond relatively dense scientific papers, there are few really good document classes. The LaTeX default is relatively good in that it produces easy-to-read documents, but to my eye fails on aesthetic criteria. Then there is a large number of mutually incompatible publisher classes, some of which are quite good, but most have warts and limitations, and also follow their own conventions for frontmatter items and such so that it's hard to switch document class. So in comparison, the situation with fonts is actually not so bad...