10.3 Humanist (Oldstyle) serif fonts
Historically, Humanist or Renaissance typefaces are the earliest fonts following the Blackletter types used by Gutenberg and other early printers. They mimic Latin handwriting and started to appear in the middle of the 15th century in places like Venice and Florence. Primarily they are very calligraphic in nature, which shows in the strongly leftward axis most apparent in the bowls of characters and the lowercase o but often also in an angled e. Other defining characteristics include a small x-height and a fairly low contrast between thick and thin strokes. Of course, Humanist typefaces do not need to come from that time period: modern designers also picked up the concepts and produced original designs in the Humanist spirit. Centaur, for example, was designed in 1916, and below we show the recent Coelacanth inspired by it. Few fonts in that style are freely available, but the selection widens considerably if you also look at commercially sold ones. All commercial fonts can be used with Unicode engines with the help of the fontspec package, assuming that you buy the OpenType or TrueType versions. Using them with pdfTEX is less straightforward — you need to take a look at the autoinst program for that.
10.3.1 Alegreya
Alegreya has a matching sans serif design. Both families are described on page 11, and their NFSS classifications are in Table 10.2 on the same page.
10.3.2 Coelacanth
Designed by Ben Whitmore, Coelacanth is inspired by the classic Centaur Type design of Bruce Rogers (1870–1957). It is one of the few Humanist serif families freely available for use with LaTEX. The family provides six weights. However, the italics are available only in medium weight and are used unchanged in other weights as well in the LaTEX setup. Support for all engines is provided through the package coelacanth by Bob Tennent.
10.3.3 fbb - A version of Cardo
Cardo is a Humanist font by David J. Perry that is based on a Venetian type from the 15th century, which was also used as the basis for Monotype’s commercial Bembo family. It was developed as part of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative.