Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Computer Modern is now one of the most overused typefaces on the planet. It looks great for that “Victorian-era American-style math paper” look.

People should mostly avoid it otherwise, IMO. There are plenty of better alternatives for typesetting pretty mathematics.

* * *

More generally about the thread here, TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents. The point of TeX is to handle standard typesetting of structured prose and mathematical notation. Any time you need flexible layout control, TeX turns into more trouble than it’s worth.

Someone using a dedicated graphical page layout or vector graphics tool is going to make a better business card (or poster, or flyer, or diagram, or ...) in less time, in a way which is much easier to modify later.

View on HN

On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. I used LaTeX (with beamer) to make several slideshows over the past few years, and it seems safe to say that this is not the exactly the kind of thing that plays to TeX's strengths.

On the other hand, there exist wizards who do things like this:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/134638/showcase-tex-...

(check out the pink one with hearts; note that it uses random numbers so it doesn't even come out the same way each time, try doing that with anything but TeX (just don't ask why you'd want to); there's also one other that also used random numbers)

That page’s examples are mostly a bunch of paragraphs of prose (that part, TeX is great at), some with fancy formatting that took significantly more effort than the equivalent effect in InDesign or QuarkXPress. The one with the Zapfino doesn’t bother using any alternate glyphs (arguably the main reason to ever use Zapfino). A few others are vector graphics projects that would be best done in Illustrator, Inkscape, or similar. As you go down the list, the examples (like the thing with the hearts) start to be examples of tacky overwrought things slapped together by amateurs.

Obviously TeX is an extremely flexible system, and it’s possible (fun even!) to use it for all kinds of purposes it wasn’t designed for. Analogously, it would also be possible to write a web application in assembly code running on an Arduino. I said it wasn’t a very effective or productive tool for the job, not that it wasn’t possible.

What I meant to say was that in the hands of the right person, it would be effective and productive, but since you're not particularly convinced by anything on that page, I think I'll have to concede this point. You win :)

> TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents.

Agreed. See the study "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" which concludes

"LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users."

The study does claim though that LaTeX users had more fun while doing worse work, so there's that... :-)

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

This conclusion makes me wonder if they were measuring LaTeX users while they were writing a new type of document for the first time.

My experience has been that once a given type of document has been written and tweaked to your satisfaction in LaTeX, the next time you write that type of document, you can just reuse the previous document as a template and not have to tweak much at all.

The first document does tend to require lots of tweaking, I'll grant that, especially if you're doing anything unusual that isn't covered by an existing LaTeX package.

Another thing that makes a big difference with LaTeX is the tools that are used to write it. If the "expert LaTeX" authors were writing LaTeX completely by hand, with no aid from any specialized tools, then that would explain their many mistakes. The use of advanced tools like the various LaTeX packages for vim and emacs make writing LaTeX documents a lot more streamlined and less error-prone.

Compared to Times New Roman? Arial/Helvetica? Calibri? Comic Sans and Papyrus?

I'd hardly put Computer Modern in anywhere near the same category.

You managed to name a bunch of typefaces which are even less suitable for tasks where someone might use Computer Modern (Times is comparable). I’m not sure what that proves....

Instead of Calibri, the Microsoft-provided typeface to use for mathematics is Cambria, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria_(typeface)#Cambria_Mat...

Personally I like Minion, http://www.typoma.com/en/fonts.html

Or combining some kind of Renaissance-style typeface with AMS Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler

Or Lucida Math, https://tug.org/store/lucida/opentype.html

If you prefer Times, try MathTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathTime TM Math http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/tmmath/tmmain.htm or STIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIX_Fonts_project

Spot on. I laughed on every single font. Each one actually has a long story on abuse.

For replacement fonts I also like Palatino

My comment was in response to the assertion that CM is somehow "overused". Compared to the fonts I listed, Computer Modern is pretty obscure.

Maybe I just wasn't clear enough on that part, in which case I sincerely apologize for my poor communication skills.

Ok, I got this, but honestly i thought you meant the opposite

No worries; you apparently weren't the only one ;)

I thought I was pretty clear, but I guess not. Makes me really wish HN had a more forgiving window for editing comments, but oh well.

I think editing comments is disabled once someone posts reply...

You can edit for up to 2 hours, I believe, regardless of any replies. You can also delete during the same interval, unless someone replies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com