This repository contains samples and a description of my favourite free fonts for use with LaTeX.
Introduction
Fonts
Bembo
Palatino
Crimson
Libertine
STIX
Charter
Utopia
Sample text
Setup
TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth's Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font packages and even OpenType-compatible engines (XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX) have emerged in the past 20 years.
A few months ago, I set out to explore this extensive set of LaTeX font options. My goal was to select a small group of high-quality free fonts which I could later choose from when typesetting different documents. As I moved forward with my search, I also became interested in the history and rationale behind the design of different fonts and this led me to write some descriptive notes on each of my favourites.
This README file contains these notes. In the paragraphs below, I list and give a brief description of seven fonts which I personally like (where the original fonts are commercial, I focus on free alternatives). These are: Bembo, Palatino, Crimson, Libertine, STIX, Charter and Utopia. I also provide a small sample of each font (containing both text and maths) so that the different choices can be easily assessed and compared. Longer samples for each font (code and resulting pdf file) are provided in the various folders in this repository.
When using LaTeX, three types of fonts can be selected and are commonly used: a roman or serif font which is normally employed for body text and which should have maths support; a sans-serif font which is sometimes used for headers; and a monospaced or typewriter font. When selecting a font for a document, it is therefore important to consider whether the font supports mathematical characters (at least if we will be typing some maths!) and also to choose an appropriate sans-serif font to accompany it (the monospaced font often differs more visibly from the roman).
This survey focuses on serif fonts as these are the usual choice for longer documents such as articles or books (although sans-serifs have become more popular for longer text in recent years). However, in keeping with the reasoning above, I have also selected accompanying sans-serif fonts for each of the seven roman choices below (all of which have maths support of some form or another). As a monospaced font, I chose Raph Levien's excellent Inconsolata, a popular choice not only in the TeX world but also as the main font in text editors.
As mentioned above, engines such as LuaLaTeX make the use of OpenType fonts possible in LaTeX. While Type 1 fonts (which often have dedicated LaTeX packages) are the simplest to setup and are available on most distributions (which makes them a good choice when co-writing documents, for example), OpenType fonts are more complete and customisable in their options and represent the best current standard in digital typography. Whenever possible (i.e. when a font is provided in Type 1 through a LaTeX package and also available as OpenType) I provide two samples, one for each configuration. In the remaining cases, I use whichever format is available. I give further details on the configuration used for producing the samples as well as on the sources of the sample text in the final two sections of this text. And now on to the fonts!
fbb and Libertinus Math in LuaLaTeX
Bembo is the oldest typeface in this survey. Released by the Monotype Corporation in 1929, the font's roman style is based on a design by Francesco Griffo (an Italian punchcutter who created the first italic type) from c. 1495. Aldus Manutius, one of the most important printers of his age, used the font to publish a short work by the cleric Pietro Bembo, after whom Monotype's face is named.
Bembo remains one of today's most popular book fonts, having been used by publishing houses such as Penguin Books or the Oxford University Press. While its old-style appearance may make it unsuitable for certain documents, Bembo has received some attention from the LaTeX community. This is due at least in part to the work of Edward Tufte (known among other things for his writings on data visualisation) whose remarkably-well-designed books use Bembo as their body text font. While these books were not composed in a TeX system, they have inspired the development of the tufte-latex document class to produce similarly designed books as well as handouts.
Books by Edward Tufte (click to enlarge). Source: Edward Tufte, via Fonts In Use. License: all rights reserved
Monotype's Bembo is a commercial font, although a web-font version of ET Book, the font used in Tufte's books, has been made available for free by Tufte himself. A more complete free alternative is Cardo, developed by David J. Perry and also based on the typeface cut for Aldus Manutius. Designed with the needs of classics and linguistics scholars in mind, Cardo has been modified and extended by Michael Sharpe for use with LaTeX through the fbb package. The fbb font is available in both OpenType and Type 1 formats and is thus suitable for use with OTF-compatible systems such as LuaLaTeX as well as pdfLaTeX.
While no maths companion font is available for fbb, Sharpe suggests the Libertine-style maths font provided by newtxmath with the libertine option in pdfLaTeX. In LuaLaTeX, I instead use Libertinus Math, an OpenType maths font developed by Khaled Hosny which is covered below.
Regarding sans-serif companions for Bembo, Tufte's books use Eric Gill's highly popular Gill Sans. Like Bembo, Gill Sans is commercial and because of this I chose Gillius ADF, a free font inspired by Gill Sans and available in OpenType format, as an alternative. The gillius package provides support for pdfLaTeX as well as LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX.
TeX Gyre Pagella in LuaLaTeX
Palatino is one of the most widely-used and recognisable fonts of the 20th century. Designed by Hermann Zapf and first released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry, Palatino was inspired by old-style Italian Renaissance types and influenced by Zapf's expertise in calligraphy. The font is named after Giambattista Palatino, one of the best-known calligraphers of the Renaissance period.
Palatino was originally intended for use in headings and display printing and aimed to be clearly readable even on small sizes and poor-quality paper. Two distinctive features which contribute to its legibility are a larger x-height and wider apertures when compared to other fonts in the Renaissance tradition.
In the TeX universe, Palatino-style fonts are perhaps the most commonly used serif fonts after the default CM Roman. The close relation between Palatino and TeX goes beyond its mere frequent use with the typesetting system, however. Indeed, Donald Knuth discussed the design of CM Roman with Zapf (see the photo below), who would later create the AMS Euler maths font with Knuth's assistance under commission by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Zapf was also an honorary member of the board of the TeX Users Group since 1980 with the title of "Wizard of Fonts."
Donald Knuth (left) and Hermann Zapf (right) (click to enlarge). Source: Bettmann, via Getty Images
Like Bembo, Palatino is a commercial font. Fortunately, several clones of the original font have been developed over the years and are available for easy integration with LaTeX. In pdfLaTeX, I chose the text font provided by the newpx package. As maths fonts, I provide samples using the maths companion font provided by the same package as well as an Euler-like font provided by the eulervm package. As you can see in the sample below, Euler has a distinctive look as a maths font with its upright letters instead of the usual italics. In this respect it aims to reflect the typical handwriting of mathematicians on the blackboard.
New PX and Euler-VM in pdfLaTeX
Unlike many free fonts which are only available in Type 1 format, Palatino also has a free OpenType clone with maths support: the GUST project has developed the TeX Gyre Pagella font for which an OTF maths companion font is conveniently provided (there also exists another free OTF maths font in Palatino-style called Asana Math). Unfortunately, there is no complete OpenType version of the Euler maths font: only an abandoned port named Neo Euler (developed by Khaled Hosny) exists. Because of this, I do not provide a sample with an Euler-like font in LuaLaTeX.
The most natural sans-serif companion to Palatino is probably Zapf's recent Palatino Sans font. Optima, perhaps his best-known creation after Palatino, could also pair well with it. Unfortunately, both of these fonts are commercial and no free clone is available for easy use with LaTeX (the free URW Classico, an Optima clone, is available as a LaTeX package but is not included in most distributions).
An alternative approach to looking for a sans-serif font which closely matches the serif in its design is to choose a visibly different sans font. Unlike a loosely matched sans font whose differences relative to the roman can create an unwelcome mild dissonance, a clearly dissimilar font can relieve this tension by making the high contrast a feature of the design. In this spirit, several LaTeX packages which use a Palatino clone as their main text font have opted for a Helvetica clone as a sans-serif companion. Here I follow this approach by choosing TeX Gyre Heros, a free Helvetica clone also developed by the GUST project. Heros is available in both OpenType and Type 1 formats, and a package is provided for easy use of the latter with pdfLaTeX.
Finally, an interesting set of fonts based on Palatino (derived from URW Palladio) but with a unique and distinctive character is Kp-Fonts (the Johannes Kepler project – no relation to Robert Slimbach's Kepler font) developed by Christophe Caignaert. This complete set of fonts (it contains roman, sans-serif, monospaced and maths fonts) is available for use with LaTeX through the kpfonts package. Each of the three text fonts includes old-style figures and true small caps and is available in both the standard weight as well as a lighter weight. Even the default version of the roman font is, however, of a lighter weight than Palatino and in this respect is more similar to Aldus, a second font designed by Zapf which is similar to Palatino but intended for book use. For an example of the Aldus font in use in a TeX system, see the documentation of the fontspec package which employs it as its main body font.
Kp-Fonts in pdfLaTeX
Cochineal in pdfLaTeX
Crimson is a free, open-source font designed by Sebastian Kosch in 2010. At the time, Kosch says, high-quality free text fonts were scarce and so Crimson was developed with the laudable goal of providing a "workhorse font for the masses." Crimson is an old-style font in the Renaissance tradition and Kosch mentions as inspiration some of the most popular 20th century revivals of fonts from that period such as Robert Slimbach's Minion or Jan Tschichold's Sabon.
Michael Sharpe's cochineal package provides a fork of the Crimson font with many glyphs added to ensure appropriate support for LaTeX use. A maths companion font is provided through the newtxmath package with the cochineal option. Unfortunately, newtxmath is not designed for combined use with OpenType text fonts through LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX. Therefore, and even though cochineal includes an OpenType version, only a pdfLaTeX sample is provided (which uses the newtxmath companion font). As a sans-serif companion, Sharpe uses Pablo Impallari's Cabin (another font inspired by Gill Sans) in the documentation of cochineal and I follow this choice.
One of Crimson's characteristics is its (coincidental, according to Kosch) similarity to Slimbach's Minion font (although Crimson has a smaller x-height and more elaborate details – see the image below). Minion has become a standard choice for book typesetting since its first release in 1990 (for example, it is the main body-text font used in Robert Bringhurst's classic text, The Elements of Typographic Style). Even though it is a commercial font, Minion (in particular its OpenType version, MinionPro) has gained popularity with LaTeX users as it comes bundled with some Adobe products and is thus available by default on some systems (the legality of using the font which comes bundled with Adobe Reader is dubious, however). While Crimson is not a clone of Minion, the similarity between the two fonts may make it a suitable free alternative for those looking for the now-classic look that Minion Pro provides.
Minion Pro Regular (top) and Crimson Text (bottom). Source: Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts
Libertinus in LuaLaTeX
The Linux Libertine font family is perhaps the best-known example of an open-source font designed in the Internet era, and for good reason as it is an excellent font collection. While the three fonts we covered above are primarily inspired by old-style Renaissance type from the 15th and 16th centuries, Libertine draws more on the 17th century Baroque style as well as the modern book fonts of the 19th and 20th centuries, and therefore has a more contemporary appearance than either Bembo or Crimson.
Libertine was developed as part of the Libertine Open Fonts Project which was started by Philipp H. Poll with the goal of releasing fonts under a GNU license. An important reference in its design was Times New Roman and its predecessor, Times Roman. Despite the similarities between the two fonts, there are also some clear differences. In terms of dimension, Libertine has a smaller x-height than Times (which was optimised for readability at small sizes, having been originally designed for newspaper columns) and a smaller footprint overall (see the image below). Another important difference is in the serifs, with Libertine's being flatter and less sharp compared with Times' crisp, angular and somewhat triangular ones (see this interview with Poll for a more complete discussion of the rationale behind the design of Libertine and its differences relative to Times). The Libertine family includes not only the Libertine roman but also an accompanying sans-serif font, Linux Biolinum.
Times New Roman (top) and Linux Libertine (bottom) (click to enlarge). Source: osp blog
The Libertine fonts are widely used in open-source software, for example being included in Libre Office and having been used to set the Wikipedia logo. In LaTeX, the fonts have been conveniently packaged in the libertine package, with newtxmath providing an accompanying maths font through the libertine option (this font was also used as a maths companion for fbb above).
For the samples for this survey, I use not the original Linux Libertine fonts but the Libertinus family. This is a fork of the Libertine fonts by Khaled Hosny which provides an OpenType maths companion font (thus making Libertinus one of a very small number of fonts with OTF maths support) and fixes some of the bugs in Libertine. In addition to the roman, sans-serif and maths versions, Libertinus also provides monospaced and display fonts, as well as a semibold weight for the serif font; this level of completeness is one of its main strengths.
The libertinus package enables the easy use of Libertinus in Type 1 format (for pdfLaTeX) as well as OpenType. We provide a sample using both pdfLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. Libertinus Math is only available as an OpenType font and therefore for the pdfLaTeX example we use newtxmath.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.