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Which Unicode fonts are available with grades/optical sizes comparable to Donald Knuth's awesome eight grades in Computer Modern Roman?

It would be great to get at least 3 options!

This question is a logical follow-up question to this popular question. Although this question is not targeting a specific problem, I think it will provide some really valuable answers for XeLaTeX and LuaLaTex users.

Finding out that Computer Modern Unicode does not have the optical sizes / grades of Computer Modern Roman was disappointing. As a linguist, using unicode characters makes things much easier.

My options are as follows:

  1. Use a unicode font that has many optical sizes / grades (like CM Roman)

  2. Use CM Roman and hope for the best

  3. Create a custom command for all instances of unicode input/output (e.g. phonetic transcripts)

Option 1 is the best option!

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Jonathan Komar
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  • I think you should probably edit your previous question to incorporate this information. This page, as it stands, does not provide an actual question, just a point of information. – John Wickerson Jun 03 '13 at 16:16
  • @John Wickerson It has been said that this site operates best when questions are kept separate such that each page has one question and one answer. The question provided is straightforward. I prefer to see how it goes and if it turns out that no usual answers are provided, I will consider integrating it into the previous question. – Jonathan Komar Jun 03 '13 at 16:22
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    Do you want one font per answer or a single over all answer? The former sounds like 'community wiki' to me (no one right answer, no rep for answers). – Joseph Wright Jun 03 '13 at 16:24
  • I see the link to the earlier question, but this is really about fonts rather than TeX, so it's borderline for 'graphic design'. What do others think? – Joseph Wright Jun 03 '13 at 16:25
  • @macmadness86 Oh, I see now that the question is in the title. I had been focussing only on the body of your question. – John Wickerson Jun 03 '13 at 16:29
  • @Joseph Agreed, it is borderline, however it really does apply to fontspec, a latex package (hence the tag). I expect it to provide useful knowledge to the target group of XeLateX and LuaLaTeX users. That was the basis of my decision to ask it in this forum. As with all questions on this site, the best answer wins. Determining that would be the user who asked the question — me. – Jonathan Komar Jun 03 '13 at 16:30
  • one thing you may want to ask yourself is: is having as many grades as possible really your top priority? What is it that you need those eight grades for? What do you find unsatisfactory with your current number of grades? I'm saying this because it's easy to get fooled by sheer numbers, and forget about the things that really matter. – Nils L Jun 03 '13 at 19:23
  • @Nils L Well Mister, that made me chuckle and think—more is better! But on a serious note, the grades are noticeable, otherwise I would not have asked the corresponding question about latex auto-changing fonts. At the very least it is yet another excuse to leave MS Word in the dust in the name of quality typesetting. Also, I have something against the phrase, "It is good enough" and I think most people who use latex would agree with me on that. "We can do better" is perhaps a better motto. – Jonathan Komar Jun 03 '13 at 20:32
  • I'm not saying: x is good enough, or: the grades aren't noticeable. They are noticeable -- which is why I said a regular from one grade x with smallcaps or italics from an entirely different grade on the same line at the same size is unacceptable. My main point is: what is being sacrificed when it's all about the number of grades? – Nils L Jun 03 '13 at 20:39
  • @Nils L, yes point taken. My intent is not to find fonts with 8 grades. My intent is to find fonts comparable to Donald Knuth's original font. I only mention eight grades because 1. It is a good target number based on what we already have 2. Knuth chose to implement 8 of them likely for a reason 3. MOST IMPORTANTLY I hope that this will weed out any lame answers and result in people leaving quality answers below. – Jonathan Komar Jun 03 '13 at 20:45

4 Answers4

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A number of Adobe's fonts come in a range of grades, the most versatile (and most widely used) being . It comes with 4 optical masters: caption (intended for 6–8 pt) - regular (9-14 pt) - subheading (14-24pt) - display (>24 pt). This may sound less awesome than eight, but the point is: everything is available in all grades -- very unlike Computer Modern, which, for example, has smallcaps in only one grade.

Everything, in this case, means, IIRC,

  • all styles (reg, it, each including smallcaps),
  • all weigths (reg, med, semi, bold)
  • all widths (reg, condensed)
  • and, within each of these, the full character set

...resulting in 65 font files. As for the unicode thing, the character set covers all Western European languages, Cyrillic, modern and polytonic Greek, maybe more.

Additionally, typoma GmbH offers Minion Math, which comes as 20 more font files: all four weights from Minion × five optical sizes—Caption, Text, Subhead, and Display as in Minon, plus Tiny, intended for second-order superscripts and subscripts.

Needless to say that, except for the four basic cuts which come with Adobe Reader, it's not a »free« (i.e. $$$) font. A font with that range of features plus that range of grades you're not going to find from non-professional type designers. It's usually either the one or the other (in most cases: the one).

maetra
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Nils L
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18

Another particularly well-done typeface is Nick Shinn's Scotch Modern and its sans-serif companion Figgins Sans. The serif comes in footnote, text, and display grade. It's a typeface rooted in the same period as Computer Modern (think Victorian-era UK, mid-1800s). [highly subjective and possibly controversial statement follows:] If Computer Modern were good-looking, this is what it would look like.

enter image description here

Language support and glyph coverage are huge. Have a look at the specimen sheet, which is a little piece of art in its own right.

Another one: when it comes to grades, the most famous font is probably Sumner Stone's Cycles. Released in the early 90s, with seven grades, if was the font that kind of popularized the idea of optical sizes in the DTP and graphic design world. The progression seems a bit more useful than Knuth's:
five - seven - nine - eleven - eighteen - twenty-four - thirty-six

http://www.stonetypefoundry.com/cyclesoverview.html

Neo-humanist style, not unlike Minion. Quite handsome, but unobstrusive, i.e. pretty versatile and useful for academic publications. OpenType Std character set. Sumner Stone also did the great ITC Bodoni (three grades).

enter image description here

A bit more exotic, not a proper alternative to CMR: The Fell Types, released under SIL Open Font License. Design sizes: 12.5 - 13.5 - 17 - 21 - 39 - 48pt, plus two ornament fonts, 17.5 and 25pt.

Further reading:

List of fonts with opticals at Typophile. More at Identifont and MyFonts. Book by Tim Ahrens (2009): Size-Specific Adjustments to Type Designs.

Nils L
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    scotch modern is absolutely gorgeous, but the numerals are entirely too flowery for practical application in math. also, i suspect that the fine hairlines will not stand up well to multiple photocopying, especially in small sizes. the solidus bottoms out at the baseline, so is suitable only for text (i may have missed something here though). absolutely wonderful for literature of the victorian period, especially if multiple languages in western scripts are involved. but, sadly, not math. – barbara beeton Jun 03 '13 at 21:06
  • why did adobe kill multiple master technology? for quite a while, that looked very promising. – barbara beeton Jun 03 '13 at 21:09
  • Something to do with “lack of support on the applications' part“ IIRC… – Nils L Jun 03 '13 at 21:29
  • well, that was more a rhetorical question (read "whimper") than a real one; the audience that really needs such niceties is too small to make a dent in the market. nobody is ever going to get rich off of math typography. – barbara beeton Jun 03 '13 at 21:47
  • re sumner stone's "cycles", not sure you mean "started it all". (perhaps "made the concept popular for desktop publishing"?) there were earlier multi-"grade" fonts for photocomposition (and even a few for early laser printers) before the early '90s, not counting computer modern, which was first conceived in 1978. – barbara beeton Jun 05 '13 at 13:14
  • exactly: "made the concept popular for desktop publishing", hence the scare quotes. Will edit that. Sounds odd indeed within a thread on Knuth's opticals from the late 70s. – Nils L Jun 05 '13 at 13:19
  • What's the code I need to use these fonts in LaTeX? – Turion Aug 01 '18 at 13:20
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The Latin Modern font family, for one, would seem to meet all of your needs.

Mico
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    it might be added that the number 8, which seems to impress @macmadness86 so much, is going to shrink quite a bit if we specify what exactly we mean by the Latin Modern family. There's 8 grades of Latin Modern Roman Regular (not it, not sc, not sf, not tt). How many grades of LMR Italic are there? 5! A line of text in \Large LMR will use the 17pt version for Regular, but fall back to the 12pt version for Italics, thus mixing two grades and rendering the 17pt version entirely useless IMHO. 5 and 6pt Italics are missing as well. Small Caps? Only available in one (!) grade. Etc... – Nils L Jun 03 '13 at 19:32
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    @NilsL - I'm not sure I understand the point of your comment about LM featuring "only" 5 separate optical sizes for the italic shape. Five shapes is, after all, still one more shape than is provided if one shells out $$$ for all four optical sizes of various fonts sold by Adobe, isn't it? Separately, are you maybe overstating just a wee bit the issues that might arise from using a 12pt-sized italics font at 17pt? – Mico Jun 03 '13 at 22:04
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    > I'm not sure I understand... that »only« was a relative rather than absolute one: 5 in relation to @macmadness86's standard of 8. I can live happily with only one or two, if the font has other qualities. > Overstating just a wee bit... maybe I am. I guess it depends on your level of sensitivity to issues like that. Mine is pretty high, I admit to being a micro-typographic nitpicker. For example, these differences I'd call »significant«. Under the magnifying glass as well as (more importantly) at reading distance. – Nils L Jun 04 '13 at 10:07
  • @Nils L Excuse me - > Donald Knuth's, the God of TeX, standard of 8. Just yesterday I didn't know what optical sizes / grades were—just recognized that texts at various sizes appear differently. – Jonathan Komar Jun 04 '13 at 10:11
5

Vollkorn

Here is a great open-source font from Friedrich Althausen with eight styles and multilingual support. http://vollkorn-typeface.com/. The following font flavors are supported:

  • PostScript OpenType .otf
  • TrueType OpenType .ttf
  • Web open Font Format .woff
  • Embedded OpenType .eot

Vollkorn Font

Ligatures

Ligatures

Glyphs

Glyphs

Kerning

Kerning

Found in this tex.stackexchange answer.

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