I work at a consulting engineering firm and write a lot of reports that are read by the public. I have an opportunity to recommend a different font for all of our written documents and am looking for something more modern/fresh than Times New Roman. Also open to recommendations for purpose specific communities about typography/fonts.
Intel’s Clear Sans.
IBM’s Plex, I’m particularly partial to their condensed sans.
Fira Sans is a good generic recommendation, their mono is again worth considering.
Adobe’s Source family (sans, serif, mono) is another inoffensive, safe choice.
erewhon is a modern workhorse serif that pairs well with all the sans fonts above. It’s derived from Adobe’s Utopia, which is used in quite a few newspapers (clear and legible without taking too much space).
STIX Two was specifically designed to replace Times New Roman in scientific + mathematical publications, if you’re looking for a font that’s different but familiar to Times New Roman, I could not recommend it enough.
Charis SIL was originally designed for laser printers and later modified for use in linguistics, it’s essentially a serif version of Verdana (same designer too). As with all the other fonts mentioned, very broad character set support.
The TeX font catalogue is a treasure trove in general.
Edit: almost forgot, the Libertinus family also comes recommended for a more ‘professional’ look.
This is super helpful! Fun fact - Erewhon is also a small chain of very high end markets in Los Angeles. Now I’m going to have to research what this word means and who came up with it first.
Try spelling it backwards ;)
Oh shit! I see it now :)
Personally I’m a huge fan of the Kepler Project font. I got hooked on it when I started writing papers in LaTeX.
Thanks for the font rec. I despise Word but have colleagues who would be unable to function in something like LaTeX. Oh well…
There is an OTF version, it’s just not bundled w/ anything by default as far as I’m aware.
Available here: https://ctan.org/pkg/kpfonts-otf?lang=en
This one is going to be an unconventional one but I do love the Ubuntu font and I try to sneak it into some documents I write.
As do I, though mainly for headings. Body text is something thin and screen legible as most of my docs are not printed.
https://fonts.google.com/?query=Vernon+Adams
Some of my favorite fonts were designed by Vernon Adams.
He passed away in 2016 but I always remember his fonts. I didn’t know him personally but after using his fonts for years and learning about his passing, l felt very sad. Take a look, you might like some of his fonts.
Thanks for the recs. I thought one of the fonts in the link was called Potato Sans, so now that one is my new personal favorite forever, even if it’s actually called Pontano Sans. :D
I was going to say use the old timey fixed width typewriter fonts that the US Army Corps uses (PDF page 5 and beyond), but I guess that they’ve switched to Times New Roman.
Maybe use open source fonts like DejaVu and Liberation?
Definitely need to avoid giant fixed-width fonts. My reports often run close to 100 pgs with Times New Roman, and using a typewriter font would blow them up even more. I’ll look into the open source suggestions, thanks!
I usually go with Fira Sans for sans serif, if the document I’m writing isn’t super formal. Mixes well with Inconsolata for code and Latin Modern (or other serif stuff) for math.
Roboto Slab, Iosevka
