10.6 Didone (Modern) serif fonts

Fonts classified as Didone or Modern (with Modern referring to a period starting in the second half of the 18th century) take the Transitional design ideas even further and introduce new aspects. The name is coined from the surnames of two very famous type designers of the period: Firmin Didot (1764–1836) and Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813).

Stroke contrast now becomes even more pronounced, with heavy parts getting even heavier and light strokes being reduced to hairlines. The weight axis is now completely vertical. The counters (the partially enclosed, somewhat rounded space in characters such as a, c, e, f, s, etc.) often become very tight. Serifs are very abrupt, narrow, and unbracketed with a nearly constant stroke width. While we have seen in Transitional fonts that some character terminals start looking more like droplets, Didone fonts often show pronounced ball terminals, either full circles or heavier teardrops.

Below we show a handful of high-quality Didone designs that have been set up for use with pdfTEX and can be used as alternatives to LaTEX’s bread and butter family Computer Modern (which too is a Didone design). Most have equally good coverage in terms of different shapes (compared to CM) but often offer more weights — in the case of the Noto families this amounts to a truly impressive number of possible alternatives.

10.6.1 Computer Modern Roman - Latin Modern Roman

Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern, the first fonts available for TEX, are classical Didone designs, and so are the derived Latin Modern fonts. Together with their matching sans serif and monospaced companions and the matching math fonts, they enable you to typeset any kind of document using a single consistent “design”. For many years these have been the fonts that most people had to use and even nowadays usually still use (after all, they work out of the box) — so much that seeing Computer Modern Typefaces became a synonym for “was produced with LaTEX” and vice versa.1 You can find the description of these families in Section 9.5.1 and their NFSS classifications in Tables 9.5 and 9.6.

10.6.2 GFS Bodoni

GFS Bodoni was designed by Takis Katsoulidis based on the work of the famous 18th century Italian type cutter Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813). LaTEX support is provided through the package gfsbodoni, which defines the command to access the font selectively. If loaded with the option default, GFS Bodoni is also made the roman default font. Besides Latin languages, the family fully supports polytonic Greek.

10.6.3 Libre Bodoni

Designed by Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the Libre Bodoni fonts are based on the 19th century Morris Fuller Benton (1872–1948)’s Bodoni ATF design. Note that this family appears to be already quite dark in its medium weight. LaTEX support for all engines is available with the LibreBodoni package by Bob Tennent.

10.6.4 GFS Didot

In 1805 the famous French type cutter Firmin Didot (1764–1836) designed a new Greek typeface influenced by the neoclassical ideals of that time that, after arriving in Greece, became widely popular and was used for all kinds of publications until the last decades of the 20th century. GFS Didot is a new design from 1994 by Takis Katsoulidis based on Didot’s original work. Unfortunately the Latin alphabet added into the font cannot be recommended because it contains very inconsistently designed characters, and the fact that it is partly inspired by Hermann Zapf’s (1918–2015) Palatino does not help. It also means that it is no longer a pure Didone design but shows a mixture of oldstyle and modern aspects. Thus, while the font provides a valuable polytonic Greek alphabet, you should match it with a different font for typesetting in Latin; i.e., do not use the gfsdidot support package because that makes the Latin font the default. A much better alternative for classical texts is Theano Didot described in the next section.

10.6.5 Theano Didot

The Theano Didot font is one of several fonts designed by Alexey Kryukov from historic samples, in this case, the work of Firmin Didot (1764–1836). Originally meant to be polytonic Greek-only typefaces, Alexey supplemented them with stylistically matching Latin letters (and some of his fonts, though not Theano Didot, also with Cyrillic). This makes them very suitable for scholarly work reproducing the look of old classical text editions.

LaTEX support for all engines is provided through the package TheanoDidot by Bob Tennent offering the options scaled and oldstyle. Note that this font, though of high-quality, does not offer small capitals, italics, or an oblique shape and is therefore suitable only for more classical texts that do not require such shapes.

10.6.6 Noto Serif

The Noto Serif fonts (an extended version of Droid Serif with well-designed small capitals) have matching sans and monospaced designs. The families are described together on page 26, and the NFSS classification is given in Table 10.14 on page 28. A sample page with matching math fonts is shown in Figure 12.38 on page 287.

10.6.7 Old Standard

Designed by Alexey Kryukov, Old Standard (revised in 2019 by Robert Alessi) reproduces the printing style of the early 20th century, reviving a specific type of Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces. The glyph set provided by the font supports typesetting of Old and Middle English, Old Icelandic, Cyrillic (with historical characters, extensions for Old Slavonic and localized forms), Gothic transliterations, critical editions of Classical Greek, Latin, etc.

10.6.8 Playfair Display

As the name indicates, Playfair Display, designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen, is well suited for titling and headlines, but less so for continuous body text. The font has a large x-height, while capitals and descenders are fairly short. The latter allows it to be set with little leading if space requirements are tight.

LaTEX support for all engines is available with the PlayfairDisplay package by Bob Tennent supporting the usual options such as scaled or oldstyle.