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I am looking for a broader, fatter Computer Modern and I already found out that the only way to do this correctly is to use MetaFont to create a different version of Computer Modern.

The idea is now to find a good and matching MetaFont File for my purposes and to generate a TrueType Font from it to be able to use this font via LuaLaTeX. I am working on OS X so there is no way to automatically let FontForge correct the font output by mf2pt1 and I have no knowledge whatsoever on MetaFont, typography and so and so forth, apart from that I don't have the time to fiddle with the files just by trial and error, there are just too many parameters that concern the font weight for this.

My question: Has anyone here ever dealt with this problem and maybe already came up with a solution in the form of a working MetaFont File? The results I get are very shitty to be honest, often I have big artifacts because of strange intersections and new nodes.

What the result should optimally look like is something like this:

Font on the top left corner is usual CM, the rest is made thicker with pdfrender. pdfreader doesnt use subpixel rendering, and even no Antialiasing at all, Preview is broken in Yosemite.

Please don't care too much for the language being german, it's just a document I tried it on.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Friedrich
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    why use cm at all rather than just choose a different font family? – David Carlisle Apr 07 '15 at 21:45
  • I actually do like the font a lot, if it were a little bolder it would be perfect. I often encounter big problems reading it on pdf readers that don't have good anti aliasing like subpixel rendering, but even in printed form it would be a nice to have. – Friedrich Apr 07 '15 at 21:47
  • Why is OS X a problem for letting FontForge do corrections? FontForge worked better for me on OS X than it ever has on Linux! – cfr Apr 07 '15 at 21:51
  • I can't access it from terminal right away, at least I haven't found out yet. Still: A set up .mf file would be what I am looking for. – Friedrich Apr 07 '15 at 21:56
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    Sorry, but a project like this would involve a huge investment in term of time, for a result that is probably not as good as you expect. – egreg Apr 07 '15 at 22:52
  • Well, you'd have to install it, of course. – cfr Apr 08 '15 at 03:02
  • Even if you produce fantastic metafont versions, they will look terrible in certain PDF viewers and will not be scalable. (In the terms of your other question, you will not get vector fonts.) Because that is the nature of metafont. You can use e.g. a 5pt font at 8pt or something. That will increase the weight, though it will also alter other characteristics of the font. But that will probably yield better results than trying to construct a new font. Especially since you will need many such fonts. (Have you checked how many .mf files Computer Modern includes?) – cfr Apr 08 '15 at 03:07
  • @cfr I already checked how many .mf files it includes, it's five different sizes per style. But that's not the problem, via mf2pt1 you can make it a post script font and via FontForge you can make that font true type, so things are clear here. – Friedrich Apr 08 '15 at 06:25
  • This question is a duplicate in terms of what the asker is looking for, but the other one seems to be inactive and it doesn't have a satisfying answer yet. – Friedrich Apr 08 '15 at 06:50
  • Unless you do manual corrections, you will lose quality with each conversion. In particular, you cannot convert between postscript and truetype fonts without loss of quality. The other question has an answer which demonstrates how to use metafont. That may not be the answer you hoped for, but I don't think you are going to get an entirely satisfactory answer, to be honest, because I don't think there is one. As @egreg says. – cfr Apr 08 '15 at 10:56
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    See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110569/it-is-possible-to-make-fonts-appear-heavier-darker-in-pdf-output-of-latex. – cfr Apr 08 '15 at 11:06
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    @cfr I came up with a different solution, it works but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post it as I didn't check the whole copyright stuff yet: Using FontForge to embolden the Latin Modern Fonts gives me a useable thing, it works great with XeLaTeX. – Friedrich Apr 09 '15 at 20:59

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