from Hacker News

Using Computer Modern on the web (2013)

by phab on 5/12/21, 10:51 AM with 97 comments

• by m000 on 5/12/21, 12:53 PM

  Just no. CM font was made for printing. It was last updated in 1992, before PDF was even a thing. CM is not made for screens and it is a horrible idea to use it on the Web.

  > It's so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern.

  It's more like "undergrad students use it in their papers because they don't know better". The only Computer Science publications I'm aware of that still use CM are the Springer LNCS/LNAI series. Which also happen to still use a template optimized for printing the proceedings as books. And AFAIK, these templates are universally hated and considered archaic and outdated: They look bad everywhere (screen, A4 printout, letter printout) except the Springer-printed paper volume.

• by mihaic on 5/12/21, 12:55 PM

  While I always found Computer Modern to be a beautiful font, every paper I read that's typeset with it seems harder to understand. I find it hard to explain, but it somehow makes processing information and retention harder for me, and it took me a long while to be sure that it wasn't the novelty of the subject matter.

• by lmns on 5/12/21, 12:30 PM

  Am I the only one who never liked Computern Modern? It works and the math symbols are very complete, but it just looks way too thin.

• by cpp_frog on 5/12/21, 2:03 PM

  I am actually thinking of starting a math blog where I have to use extensive use of mathematical symbols. Using computer modern would also be nice. My idea was to keep the blog as minimalistic as possible, but I have not figured out how to do it the way I like. Terry Tao's blog [0] uses images for math symbols, and other people use MathJax [1] (but macros, which are used for convenience take too long to load). Maybe I'll just have to keep linking to PDFs.

  [0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/

  [1] https://www.mathjax.org/

• by 5tefan on 5/12/21, 1:36 PM

  I read a lot. Novels, work related stuff. I also get old.

  As for now my fonts of choice are Bookerly and Atkinson Hyperledgible.

  Because from my experience they make it easier on my eyes. Noticably so.

  I would set them asap as global font in Win10 if this would be possible.

  Please note, that I haven't said anything about style or beauty or so. Ergonomics first. CM is not even close to what I want from a font.

• by CarVac on 5/12/21, 12:41 PM

  I like Computer Modern, but mainly on print or on high DPI displays. It looks pretty terrible on low pixel density displays because of how thin it is.

• by fdej on 5/12/21, 1:30 PM

  This version of CM looks too thin. The version that comes with KaTeX (https://github.com/KaTeX/katex-fonts) looks great in the browser though. Would be nice if someone packaged that font in a more user-friendly way.

• by korginator on 5/12/21, 1:28 PM

  CMR has been one of the worst possible fonts that proliferated throughout the academic world. I don't understand it, perhaps it's just me, but there are dozens of other fonts that are more readable on paper and on screen.

  There's just something very wrong about the glyphs, the relative widths of letters, and the way that some of the letters get sort of squished together to make the text nearly unreadable.

  I remember way back in the 1990's when I had to get an approval from the head of our department to submit my thesis in another font because I refused to use CMR.

• by Jiocus on 5/13/21, 3:00 AM

  I think it's interesting, and I appreciate, that fonts can communicate so much all by themselves, raise all kinds of opinions, a cult following or a shared 'in-culture'.

  At uni, a friend and I spent ridiculous time 'perfecting' a few Latex documents for minor assignments, so that when handed over to the senior and cool infosec crowd supervising us would give it a quick glance, followed up by a “Is that latex? Looks good.”. Ironic detached praise and humbleness commenced. “It's alright I guess, sure”.

  I don't think anyone was ever fooled into believing it was anything more than a play on a shared hacker appreciation. Of making the effort for no reason but it being harder than all the sane alternative ways of producing a document (I'm not a mathmaticians).

  Computer Modern gives me the same feeling. The font not being a modern font is a useful feature if it supports what you want to say. It has enough character that the idea of people using it by accident feels unlikely. People who doesnt's care seem to prefer sans-serifs.

  I don't find it strange that CM being so intertwined with the tools used by people who requires typesetting, not word processing, would find that there is a level of shared convention. Based on pragmatism or even aesthetics. As someone wrote in this thread,

  > “When I see Computer Modern I see an author who didn't get distracted choosing a better font.”

  If we're looking back, there are loads of fonts that literally couldn't have been designed with screens in mind, as screens weren't a thing. I don't that as a reason to dismiss their continued use by whoever see their purpose.

  Disclaimer: IBM 3270 everything. Computer Modern when celebrating.

• by bcoates on 5/12/21, 1:16 PM

  The hinting on Computer Modern Sans is broken to the point of unreadability at default font size on my system

  Windows + Chromium + ~200dpi display, default (1.5x) display scale

• by sgerenser on 5/12/21, 1:55 PM

  Computer Modern isn't the most readable font in the first place, but these look absolutely terrible on Windows (in Edge, probably identical to Chrome) on a ~220dpi display. They're at least readable on MacOS/Safari due to Apple's tendency to render fonts bolder.

• by jmmcd on 5/12/21, 1:04 PM

  I love CM, but the italic Lorem Ipsum sample on this page is uuuugggggly, so bad that it must be a bug. I hope. I'm on MacOS, Firefox 88.

  EDIT no wait, I see what has happened. It has turned the emphasised text into double-italics, instead of de-italicising it. Yuck.

• by merricksb on 5/12/21, 12:59 PM

  For those curious, discussed here at time of publication:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882

• by ChrisArchitect on 5/12/21, 5:21 PM

  old url, old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6954882

• by sneak on 5/12/21, 6:54 PM

  My own blog, which has sometimes appeared here on HN, has paragraphs set in Computer Modern.

  It's a sort of cheeky stylistic hack, in my view, as CM adds a particular feeling to reading text set in it based on the contexts in which it otherwise appears. This is why I chose it, back in 2015 when I designed the current iteration of my website.

  I thought I was being super clever, and only learned in the last year or so that CM on the web is A Thing.

• by PaulHoule on 5/12/21, 2:23 PM

  Some of the faces I like but many of them are badly rasterized at some sizes if not all all sizes.

  Also the font metrics are off the "w" and "e" in "weird" are too close for comfort on the web. TeX has a complex algorithm to justify text for print and maybe it looks better in that context.

• by ajarmst on 5/12/21, 7:45 PM

  The link to the cm-unicode project cited in the article is broken. Interested browsers can find it at https://cm-unicode.sourceforge.io/

• by jfk13 on 5/12/21, 1:07 PM

  The paragraph supposedly in "Computer Modern Serif Upright Italic" is broken; it just uses the browser's default font (because the actual name used in the @font-face rule doesn't include "Serif").

• by replwoacause on 5/13/21, 2:43 AM

  From reading these comments, it seems I'm in the minority but I really like CM and I consider myself to be a fan of good typography. There's no accounting for taste...

• by dreamcompiler on 5/12/21, 8:10 PM

  Computer Modern is one of the most butt-ugly fonts ever designed, and it would have already died a well-deserved death if it were not the default font of math and TeX. We can do much better, and we should.

• by bitwize on 5/12/21, 1:06 PM

  Oh, for the love of... Join the 21st century and write your papers in Word, with readable fonts, like everyone else.