10.7 Slab serif (Egyptian) fonts

Slab serif fonts got introduced in the 19th century, and perhaps because anything Egyptian was quite popular after Napoleon’s expedition of Egypt, they were popularized as Egyptian Hieroglyph Slab Serif and are these days still sometimes referred to as Egyptian fonts even though there is no real relationship to this country whatsoever.

Slab serif fonts form a large and varied genre. What they have in common is a fairly heavy weight (especially in fonts for display usage), low contrast between thick and thin strokes, and very prominent unbracketed serifs. Otherwise, many different design concepts are employed by different families. There are geometric designs with minimal stroke differences (like a sans serif font with added serifs), while others are very similar to traditional serif designs but with more prominent serifs.

Slab serif designs intended especially for display usage are usually very bold with exaggerated serifs to get the reader’s attention in posters, etc., by “shouting out loud”. Fonts oriented towards use at body text size or smaller usually show less extreme characteristics and often use only slab serifs to increase legibility but are otherwise close to conventional book type fonts. This is certainly true for the families shown below that are all intended for continuous text.

You can find further slab serif designs in Section 10.9 on monospaced fonts. However, the fonts there are less suited for use in continuous text because all the characters show the same width. They have therefore got their own section.

10.7.1 Bitter

Designed by Sol Matas, Bitter is a contemporary slab serif typeface for text, specially for comfortably reading on computer displays. It has a large x-height and little variation in stroke width and is somewhat darker than the regular weight of most other fonts. LaTEX support for all engines is available through the bitter package by Bob Tennent, which supports the option scaled for specifying a scale factor.

10.7.2 Concrete Roman

For the text of his book Concrete Mathematics [58], Donald Knuth designed a new typeface [94] to go with the Euler mathematics fonts designed by Hermann Zapf (1918–2015) [202]. This font family, called Concrete Roman, was created from the Computer Modern METAFONT sources by supplying different parameter settings.

LaTEX support for the pdfTEX engine is provided through the package ccfonts by Walter Schmidt (1960–2021). The package takes care of small but important typographical details, such as increasing the value of slightly because of the darker color of the font. The feature provided by the exscale package is available as the package option exscale; see Section 9.5.7 on page →I 704 for details. The exscale package itself cannot be used because it is set up to work with only Computer Modern math fonts.

Example pages of mathematical typesetting are shown in Figure 12.39 on page 288 (with Concrete Math) and in Figure 12.40 on page 289 (with Euler fonts).

Note that the font has no bold weight. Instead, the LaTEX support file uses Computer Modern bold by default as a substitute, which does not work very well if the fonts are mixed (though it gets emphasized due to the color change).

10.7.3 DejaVu Serif

DejaVu Serif exists in a regular and a condensed cut and has a matching sans serif and monospaced design. You can find the description of all three families on page 12 and their NFSS classifications in Table 10.4 on page 13.

10.7.4 Roboto Slab Serif

Roboto Slab Serif has a sans serif companion and a matching monospaced font as well. All three families are described in more detail on page 34, and their NFSS classifications are found in Table 10.19 on page 35.

10.7.5 Source Serif Pro

Yet another family with matching sans serif and monospaced families but by more than one designer is Source Serif Pro. The three families are described together on page 35, and their NFSS classifications are found in Table 10.20 on page 36.