Recently, @MadestMadness asked about favourite fonts...
So here are my thoughts.
First, I’m not a font nerd. I just go with what I see people use around me as long as it pleases me. Most of my font attachments are irrational.
Originally, I had decided that I like Garamond. The one I ended up using most often was EB Garamond by Georg Duffner. It’s what I wanted to use. I used it for my website, for letters, and so on. What irritated me, however, was how bold and italics aren’t part of the font, historically. And somehow this matters to me – that’s simply the kind of person I am, I fear.
Looking at the CSS files for this site, this is what I’ve been using, based on some files in my CSS folder:
+-----------+--------------------------------+ | Years | body font-family | +-----------+--------------------------------+ | 2018–2019 | ”DejaVu Serif”, Palatino, | | | serif | | 2015–2017 | ”Palatino Linotype”, “Book | | | Antiqua”, Palatino, serif | | 2013–2014 | ”Noticia Text”, Symbola, serif | | 2012 | Garamond, serif | | 2011 | Garamond, GaramondNo8, | | | “Bookman Old Style”, Cochin, | | | Baskerville, serif | +-----------+--------------------------------+
As you can see, I moved away from Garamond for the website. And now I also use **bold** and *italics* instead of *underline* and *letter spacing* for emphasis. I did feel cool about using letter spacing for emphasis.
These days I just think that most people will have Palatino installed, and on systems that aren’t Windows or macOS people will most likely have DejaVu installed, and I don’t want to serve web fonts by Google, and basically I think web fonts are a waste of resources, so “DejaVu Serif”, Palatino it is.
The list of web safe fonts doesn’t actually include Palatino. The MDN site links to CSS Font Stack which has a “complete collection of web safe CSS font stacks.” Whatever that means, exactly!
Palatino: Win: 99.29%, Mac: 86.13%.
Good enough for me! Better than Garamond, in any case (Win: 86.47%, Mac: 49.91%).
Tufte’s books primarily use two typefaces: Bembo and Gill Sans. Bembo is used for the headings and body text, while Gill Sans is used for the title page and opening epigraphs in Beautiful Evidence. Since neither Bembo nor Gill Sans are available in default LaTeX installations, the Tufte-LaTeX document classes default to using Palatino and Helvetica, respectively.
Palatino!
But later, when I wanted to create a PDF that looked similar but didn’t use the Tufte-LaTeX document class, I found the fbb document class:
The package provides a Bembo-like font package based on Cardo but with many modifications, adding Bold Italic, small caps in all styles, six figure choices in all styles, updated kerning tables, added figure tables and corrected f-ligatures. Both OpenType and Adobe Type 1 versions are provided; all necessary support files are provided.
Perfect!
The Wikipedia page on Bembo also mentions Cardo and free and open-source fonts. Interesting.
Cardo is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists. Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters. It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.
And there’s ET Book:
A webfont of the typeface used in Edward Tufte’s books.
It has it’s own ET Book website. Maybe one day. For now, I’m staying with DejaVu Serif or Palatino for my website, and with fbb for my PDFs (examples).
Iosevka and the Brutalist theme for Emacs
#Fonts
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Years ago I’d say Palatino for serifs, Aller for san-serifs and Exocet/Morpheus for exotics. Later I had Futura phase which I am not sure had ended. Currently it pretty much anything free that has 4+ (regular/bold/italic/bold italic) variations, although I am fond of both versions of Alegreya.
– K Yani 2019-09-28 09:17 UTC
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Ah, Exocet will always be Planescape for me! ❤
– Alex Schroeder 2019-09-28 09:41 UTC
