10.2 Samples of larger font families
We start by discussing the freely available bigger families in alphabetical order, i.e., those that offer matching serif, sans serif, and monospaced designs (or at least two of them). We already covered LaTEX’s standard families Computer Modern and Latin Modern in Section 9.5.1 on page →I 684 in the previous chapter, so they are not repeated here. Samples for all of them (including CM and LM fonts) are later repeated in the sections devoted to serif, sans serif, and typewriter fonts, to allow for easy comparison to other fonts that have similar characteristics.
10.2.1 Alegreya
The Humanist typeface Alegreya, designed by Juan Pablo del Peral, is intended for body text but also works well in display sizes. One of its characteristic features is the widening of its stems towards the top. It is offered in five weights, upright, italics, and Small Caps, and has a matching sans serif Alegreya Sans.
LaTEX support for all engines is provided by the Alegreya and AlegreyaSans packages by Bob Tennent with the typical options such as scaled, oldstyle, etc.
10.2.2 CM Bright - A design based on Computer Modern Sans
The Computer Modern Bright (CM Bright) fonts by Walter Schmidt (1960–2021) are based on the METAFONT sources of Computer Modern Sans. This family of sans serif fonts is designed to serve as a legible body font. It comes in three weights with matching typewriter and math fonts, including the AMS symbols. LaTEX support for the pdfTEX engines is provided through the package cmbright. A sample page with mathematics is shown in Figure 12.42 on page 290.
10.2.3 DejaVu - A fork of Bitstream Vera
Bitstream Vera is a freely available set of typefaces in TrueType format designed by Jim Lyles from Bitstream. It consists of slab serif, sans serif, and monospace fonts in two weights. The monospaced font is suitable for technical work with a clear distinction of often similar characters. The sans serif font is the default font used by Python’s Matplotlib library for producing plots.
The Vera families were released with a license that permits changes, and as a result several projects used Vera as a basis. The DejaVu project was initiated by Štˇepán Roh with the aim to provide a wider range of characters while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development.
For LaTEX, there has been support for the original Vera fonts for a long time under the name Bera fonts, but this covered only the Latin character encoding T1. More recently Pavel Faráˇr provided pdfTEX support for the DejaVu families (which offers additional shapes and also covers Greek and Cyrillic) through the packages DejaVuSerif, DejaVuSans, DejaVuSansCondensed, and DejaVuSansMono. All packages support the option scaled, which is helpful if the fonts are combined with other families. There also exists the package dejavu that simply calls all three packages in turn.
Unicode eng
10.2.4 Fira fonts
The Fira fonts have been designed by Erik Spiekermann and Ralph du Carrois for the Firefox OS. The Humanist sans serif typeface Fira Sans is available in seventeen weights of which a suitable subset has been set up for use with LaTEX. The accompanying monospaced font Fira Mono is available in three weights, offers oblique (and faked italics), but does not offer Small Caps shapes.
LaTEX support for all engines is provided by the packages FiraSans and FiraMono by Bob Tennent with the typical options such as scaled, oldstyle, etc.
10.2.5 Gandhi fonts
The Gandhi families are designed by Cristobal Henestrosa and Raul Plancarte in collaboration with David Kimura and Gabriela Varela for Librerias Gandhi, a bookstore chain in Mexico that makes them freely available.
LaTEX support for all engines is provided through the package gandhi by Bob Tennent offering the usual options such as scaled, sfdefault, oldstyle, etc. The fonts are not part of the standard distribution but can be installed with getnonfreefonts.
10.2.6 Go fonts
Designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow for the Go project, the Go font families consist of a humanistic sans serif font in three weights and a matching monospaced, slap serif font available in two weights.
Both families have very distinctive forms for zero, capital O, lowercase l, digit one, and capital I, making them very suitable for displaying computer code without the danger of misinterpretations. LaTEX support for all engines is provided by the packages GoSans and GoMono by Bob Tennent.
10.2.7 Inria fonts
The Inria families are free fonts designed by the Black foundry for the Inria research institute in France. Offered are a serif and sans serif design in three weights with matching italics. For
10.2.8 Kp (Johannes Kepler) fonts
The Kp family of typefaces has been designed by Christophe Caignaert in the first two decades of the 21st century. It was inspired by Hermann Zapf’s (1918–2015) Palatino. Recently Daniel Flipo produced OpenType versions of the fonts, so now they can be used with all engines.
The fonts support both oldstyle and lining numbers. To get oldstyle numerals with pdfTEX, you need to append osn to the base family name shown in Table 10.9 on the next page; e.g., use jkpxosn. Alternatively, it is possible to select oldstyle numerals as well as two further glyph variations: a swash uppercase Q and rare (historical) ligatures. This is done by appending os instead, and it gives you output such as
10.2.9 Libertinus - A fork of Linux Libertine and Biolinum
Linux Libertine, designed by Philipp H. Poll, is a transitional serif typeface inspired by 19th century book type and is intended as a replacement for the Times font family. It is available in three weights, each with italics and small capitals. Philipp also designed a complementary humanist sans serif face named Linux Biolinum and a matching monospaced font Linux Libertine Mono.
Work on the fonts ceased in 2003, and afterwards a number of forks appeared that continued the development under new names. Interesting from a LaTEX perspective is Libertinus by Khaled Hosny, who also added supporting math fonts. Package support for this fork is provided through the libertinus package by Bob Tennent and Herbert Voß. The package offers options to set up all families or individual ones, scale some of them, select oldstyle figures, etc.
10.2.10 Lucida fonts
The Lucida extended family of typefaces has been designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Besides being popular choices in computer operating systems, because of their screen legibility, the fonts are also widely used for scientific and technical publishing. Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans, and Lucida Math are the main typeface families used for this book. They are commercial, so you have to buy them, but for a highquality printout that requires full support for all of LaTEX’s math capabilities, they are an attractive choice.1 Table 10.11 on the next page lists all Lucida text2 families that are sold as a set by TEX Users Group. As you will notice, there are some differences in coverage between Type 1 fonts for use with pdfTEX and Opentype fonts for use with the Unicode engines. Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans, Lucida Sans Typewriter, Lucida Blackletter, Lucida Casual, Lucida Calligraphy, and Lucida Handwriting are available for all engines (though the Opentype versions of the fonts have a far larger glyph coverage, because they are not restricted to 256 glyphs). However, there are also a number of typefaces that are available only in Type 1 for pdfTEX or only in OpenType format for X TE EX or LuaTEX.
All Lucida font families share common design principles and are intended to be mixed and matched in arbitrary (possibly surprising) ways. In particular, Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans, and Lucida Sans Typewriter are meant to be used in unison, and this is possible in all engines. For pdfTEX there is the package lucidabr that also sets up Lucida Math for you — sample pages with mathematics are shown in Figures 12.24 to 12.26 on pages 278–279. If you want only the text fonts, then altering ,
10.2.11 Merriweather fonts
Designed by Eben Sorkin for Adobe, Merriweather features a large x-height and open letterforms, making it very readable at small sizes. The companion sans serif design Merriweather Sans is semi-condensed. Both families are offered in four weights with
10.2.12 Google’s Noto and Droid fonts
The Noto family of fonts are Google’s attempt to eventually provide glyph coverage for all languages and scripts defined by the Unicode standard. Right now it consists of more than 100 individual fonts with a total of nearly 64000 characters covering most (though clearly not all, given that Unicode 14 has more than twice the number of defined characters) scripts in their entirety.1 Besides the goal of full coverage, Noto is designed to provide visual harmony across multiple languages/scripts (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) allowing the different Noto fonts to be easily used together.
The Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs in the Noto fonts are derived from the Droid family designed by Steve Matteson — an earlier commission by Google for the Android operating system. They are in fact the Droid fonts, but with additional weights, real small capitals, a greater glyph coverage (e.g., full polytonic Greek), and some errors corrected.
To use Droid with the pdfTEX engine, the packages droid, droidmono, droidsans, and droidserif by Mohamed El Morabity are available. Except for droid, the packages accept the option scaled to specify a scale factor when loading individual fonts.
10.2.13 IBM Plex
The IBM Plex families have been developed by Mike Abbink at IBM in collaboration with Bold Monday and others with the intention to represent the IBM Brand spirit. Each family is offered in eight different weights with upright and italic shapes. Small capitals are not supported, and
IBM Plex Serif was inspired by Bodoni and Janson and incorporates oldstyle and Didone design aspects. IBM Plex Sans is a grotesque sans serif typeface with a design that was inspired by Franklin Gothic. It also exists in a condensed version offering all weights and shapes and can thus be used as a drop-in replacement for the regular sans serif. The letter forms of IBM Plex Mono upright are based on Plex Sans, while its italic shape was inspired by an italic typeface used on IBM’s Selectric typewriter (one with a typeball).
LaTEX support for all engines is provided by the packages plex-serif, plex-sans, and plex-mono by Bob Tennent with the usual options for selecting the weights or a scaling factor (scaled).
10.2.14 PT fonts
Paratype PT fonts have been designed by Alexandra Korolkova with assistance from Olga Umpeleva and Vladimir Yefimov. They consist of a humanistic sans serif, a serif, and a monospaced font all available in regular and bold weights. All fonts offer a wide glyph range and thus are capable of typesetting text in most Latin and Cyrillic languages.
10.2.15 Quattrocento
Quattrocento, designed by Pablo Impallari, is a typeface with wide and open letterforms and a large x-height, making it very legible at small sizes. It is offered in two weights and upright and oblique shapes. Quattrocento Sans is the matching sans serif design.
10.2.16 Google Roboto families
Roboto, designed by Christian Robertson for Google, is a neo-grotesque sans serif typeface. It has been used as the operating system font for Android since 2011 (replacing Droid) and several of Google’s web applications, which contributed to its growing popularity. The companion monospaced font is Roboto Mono. Roboto is offered in six weights and three condensed cuts and Roboto Mono in five weights each time with upright and oblique shapes. Roboto Slab is a slab serif font based on Roboto. It comes in four weights but only in upright shape.
LaTEX support for all engines is provided by Bob Tennent through the packages roboto and roboto-mono supporting the usual options, such as scaled, various figure styles, and weight selections.
10.2.17 Adobe Source Pro
Adobe’s Source Serif Pro, designed by Frank Grießhammer, is a typeface inspired by the work of Pierre-Simon Fournier. The companion sans serif font Source Sans Pro and the monospaced Source Code Pro were designed by Paul D. Hunt. Source Sans Pro is inspired by typefaces by Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948), such as Franklin Gothic, but with larger x-height and Humanist-influenced italics. The italics for Source Code Pro got added later by Teo Tuominen.
LaTEX support for all engines is provided by Silke Hofstra through the three packages sourceserifpro, sourcesanspro, and sourcecodepro; for options see the package documentation.