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In [La]TeX documents printed in the early 1980s, fonts look noticeably thicker than they do today. Something about the advent of modern laser printers and the disappearance of older printing technologies seems to have made the fonts appear thinner.

Whatever the reason for the change, I prefer the thicker look in the old books and would like to recreate it in my own documents. And judging by what I read in Knuth's TeXBook and various articles in TuGBoat, it shouldn't be too hard to edit the font descriptions in Metafont or Metapost, increase the thickness to some value between "Computer Modern Regular"and "Computer Modern Regular Bold", and use the result as my default font.

I know I can't legally call this font "Computer Modern Medium", but that's the look I'm going for. More specifically, here is a scan of an early TUGboat article (1983), printed with âpproximately the thickness I would like to use myself.

And this finally brings me to my questions:

  • Has somebody else already done this? If so, what is the name of the resulting font and where can I get it?
  • If such a font does not exist yet, is there a cookbook-style HOWTO document that could walk me through the tweaking process in Metafont?
  • If there is no such "cookbook", what other sources should I be looking at, short of working through the entire Metafont book? (The Metafont book intimidates me. If I can get the job done without taking that deep of a dive, that's what I'd like to do.)
Thruston
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Thomas Blankenhorn
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    That would be (I guess) the am (almost modern) fonts that pre-dated cm, but with cm if you want the bitmap not type1 version you should be able to pick a mode with extra thickness – David Carlisle Apr 13 '22 at 13:12
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    simpler would be to use luatex and opentype NewComputerModern or LatinModern and then experiment with the fakebold parameter in fontspec. – David Carlisle Apr 13 '22 at 13:14
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    If not the modern approach that David suggests is an option, maybe this helps? – mickep Apr 13 '22 at 13:20
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    there's mlmodern – Robert Apr 13 '22 at 13:27
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    Yes, the work has already been done with excellent results: \usepackage{mlmodern} – musarithmia Apr 13 '22 at 13:33
  • You guys are the best! Yes, MLModern looks nice! And if I should turn out to need more blackness, and to find it worth the effort of font-hacking, I now know where to start. Thank you all for that! – Thomas Blankenhorn Apr 13 '22 at 14:57
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    As suggested by @DavidCarlisle, It looks like these are the AM fonts. The chart of output devices in the same issue as the sample indicates that TeX80 was still in use. The output for TUGboat would have been prepared on an Alphatype CRS (with a resolution of over 5000 dpi), so the only features affecting the thickness would be the font itself or the scan, which was probably done at no more the 300 dpi. However, the edges look a bit rough, and that would be totally the effect of the scan. – barbara beeton Apr 19 '22 at 01:40

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