My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (part II)

Table of Contents

Fonts
   STIX
   Charter
   Utopia
Sample text
Setup

Fonts

STIX

STIX Two in LuaLaTeX

The Scientific and Technical Information eXchange (STIX) font creation project is an initiative by a consortium of technical publishing companies (which includes the American Mathematical Society and Elsevier, among others) to provide a comprehensive set of fonts for the scientific community. First proposed in 1995, STIX provides Unicode-based fonts with coverage of the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets as well as a maths font.

Originally designed to be compatible with Times fonts, the most recent (2.0) version of STIX goes beyond mere compatibility to provide “a fresh take” on the classic font, aiming to address some of its shortcomings and expand its typographic features. A quote from type foundry Tiro Typeworks available on the project’s GitHub repository explains how the metal specimens used for pre-digital printing served as the basis for this redesign. Compared with Times New Roman, the most visible difference in STIX Two is its greater x-height (see the image below) which gives it a more modern appearance in line with more contemporary typefaces such as Charter or Utopia, covered below.

Times New Roman (top) and STIX Two (bottom) (click to enlarge). Source: Blythwood, via Wikimedia. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

While a Type 1 version of STIX Two has been made available specifically for LaTeX users who do not use OpenType-compatible engines, the STIX fonts are primarily and originally OpenType. As such, I only provide a sample of this font using LuaTeX. It is worth emphasising that this is one of only a very small number of free OpenType maths fonts (with Libertinus and the TeX Gyre fonts being the main alternatives).

Given the similarity with Times New Roman, a natural sans-serif companion for STIX Two would be Arial, Times’ classic sans pairing. Since Arial is commercial, I use instead Liberation Sans, a free alternative which was designed to be metrically compatible with the ubiquitous Arial.

Finally, and given the differences mentioned above between STIX Two and Times, I note that those looking for a more exact Times New Roman clone with OpenType maths support may be interested in TeX Gyre Termes.

Charter

XCharter in pdfLaTeX

The final two fonts in this brief survey have a distinctively more contemporary look. The first is Bitstream Charter, a transitional typeface designed by Matthew Carter in the late 1980s. Carter aimed to provide a typeface suitable for the low-resolution (300 dpi) printers of the time, and the result is a highly-legible font. In addition to a large x-height, one of the font’s distinctive features is its “economical style,” with a minimal number of curves and many straight segments (see this interview with Carter for more details on Charter and his other work; Charter is also covered in Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography online book). One prominent example of the use of this font with LaTeX is the documentation of the microtype package.

While the resolution of current printers is higher today than it was in the 1980s (in fact, the evolution of technology at the time of the font’s creation meant that its simplified design was no longer technically necessary by the time Carter had finished it!), the font’s legibility makes it very appropriate for today’s screens (most of which have resolutions lower than 300 dpi) where many of our documents are likely to be read.

In 1992, Bitstream donated a basic version of Charter to the X Consortium, allowing for its redistribution and modification. While this freely-available font does not provide some important features such as old-style figures or true small caps, an extension which includes these characters has been developed by Michael Sharpe and is provided as a Type 1 font for use with LaTeX through the XCharter package (I am not aware of an OpenType version). For our samples, this package is used together with the maths companion font provided by the newtxmath package through the charter option.

Like for the Cochineal font above, I use Cabin as a sans-serif companion since this is the font Sharpe uses in the examples provided in the documentation of XCharter. The same is true for Erewhon, the last font in this survey, covered below.

Utopia

Erewhon in pdfLaTeX

Utopia was designed by Robert Slimbach (current Principal Type Designer at Adobe) and first released in 1989. Inspired by transitional fonts such as Baskerville, with their high contrast in stroke thickness, Utopia also has more modern features such as a greater x-height and somewhat thicker, slab-like serifs.

As an Adobe font, Utopia has the distinctive characteristic of having been open-sourced (in a basic version). (While the font’s initial donation to the X Consortium generated some controversy regarding its license, Adobe later donated the font to the TeX Users Group (TUG).)

Like the free version of Bitstream Charter covered above, the basic version of Utopia which was open-sourced lacks old-style figures and true small caps. Because of this, and even though the original font can be easily used with LaTeX through the Fourier-GUTenberg package (which also provides a maths companion), I use as a text font the Erewhon font (again by Michael Sharpe) which adds these and other features. Erewhon is in fact based on a second Utopia-like font by Sharpe, Heuristica, which in turn is based directly on Utopia. However, Erewhon’s dimensions match those of the Adobe’s current version of Utopia more closely than Heuristica’s and thus justify the former’s inclusion in this survey in lieu of the latter. A maths companion is provided through the wonderful newtxmath package by calling the utopia option.

Sample text

The font samples for this survey are built with a set text comprised of some paragraphs of prose followed by a few maths formulas. The prose in the first page was taken from the lipsum package which provides easy access to the classic lorem ipsum dummy text and is based on the online Lorem Ipsum generator.

Regarding the maths on the second page, the first two paragraphs and corresponding formulas are a standard sample used to display maths fonts in use with LaTeX taken from Example 8-8-10 of the The LaTeX Companion, whose code is available on CTAN. The two theorems below, as well as the (slightly edited) lines under them, are from the article “A Survey of Free Math Fonts for TeX and LaTeX” by Stephen G. Hartke (the code for these examples is available here).

Setup

I tried to keep the LaTeX setup of the font sample documents as simple as possible. My aim was to have a minimal working preamble that I could then copy in the future whenever I wanted to use a particular font.

In pdfLaTeX, the default font encoding is set to T1 using the standard fontenc package. Maths fonts are then configured using mathtools (which loads the amsmath package and adds several features such as two-line fractions and prescripts), amssymb (for additional symbols) and the bm package (for bold weight in math mode). In LuaLaTeX, unicode-math is used to provide Unicode maths support (this makes bm unnecessary as unicode-math has its own boldface command, symbf).

In both pdfLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, the excellent microtype package is used to enable micro-typography features such as character protrusion and font expansion (see here for a helpful description of the package’s features). Finally, xcolor is used to display the sans-serif paragraph in grey.

Finally, for the setup of the fonts themselves I use the default options given in the documentation of the different font packages whenever possible.

All code, PDF files and images above are available on the GitHub repo.