It has been discussed earlier how to make the math font nicer in appearance (Bug
4915). I strongly suggest to switch the math font to Times in order to achieve
this. I will explain details below, but basically this is best done (IMHO) by
loading the package "txfonts" at the *end* of the preamble. It is necessary to
load it after any AMS package since it overwrites some AMS commands.
So why is Times better here? The standard font used by TeX is "Computer Modern"
(CM) -- a nice font which is *a lot* wider than most fonts and which uses very
light strokes for its letters. E.g. the capital "C" is almost shaped like a
circle. This property causes CM to combine badly with narrower fonts, such as
Times or Helvetica (or their MS-clones), as used in most browsers. Times is less
elegant than CM, but due to this also more readable in small scales.
Try it and you will see that the 12pt Times is very well readable and still more
friendly towards the rest of the text. In fact, you could easily choose 11pt
with Times and still get a very readable result. I also uploaded a sample at
http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Image:TeX_Font_Example.png (containing two versions of
"Times," see below). Take some distance from your screen and judge which line
has the best letters compared to the HTML text, where the Greeks are most
readable, and where the Greek and Roman letters fit together in size and shape.
So why do I suggest "txfonts"? Indeed, there are other ways to use Times, esp.
the package "mathptmx" (just the package "times" is not doing anything with the
math, which is one reason why it is long deprecated). While equivalent on Roman
text, txfonts is nicer for Greek letters, and most importantly, mathptmx has the
distressing property of using a completely different font for \mathcal, which is
not acceptable as a substitute of the current version. The sans-serif font for
txfonts is slightly overscaled as compared to mathptmx; this can be fixed by
writing \usepackage[scaled=.9]{helvet} after the point where txfonts was
included. The sans-serif then looks exactly like the one for mathptmx.
Both mathptmx and txfonts are part of standard LaTeX installations (e.g. of
package tetex-extra on Debian). Of course, there might be LaTeX installations
without them (but I think both require helvet to be available too).
- Markus Krötzsch
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement