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Latex Font

The above text was rendered with LaTeX. The text below was rendered in Libre Office.

Libre Office Font

You can see that there is a big difference in clarity, I think. Is it just me? How can I get LaTeX to produce documents with the same clarity as Libre Office? As far as I know, the reason for this difference is that LaTeX uses bitmap fonts, and applications like Libre Office use outline fonts. Is that right?

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LaTeX can use bitmap fonts and outline fonts. The resolution of your example is not good enough to decide which type of font your document use, you should better check the log file. Beside this: legibility depends also on the shape of a font. Some shapes are better suited than others on a screen. – Ulrike Fischer Dec 27 '12 at 13:14
You have to install the CM-Super font package, how you do it depends on the TeX distribution you're using. You may also try \usepackage{lmodern}. – egreg Dec 27 '12 at 13:57
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It is also rather difficult to compare the rendering as the two examples are using different fonts (some Palatino type for the LaTeX doc and something close to Times New Roman in the LO one). Also note that the rendering is not done by LaTeX itself but by the pdf viewer you are using. For example Adobe Reader used to be extremely bad at rendering Type3 font whereas other pdf viewers were not. – ArTourter Dec 27 '12 at 14:18
@artourter i would have guessed a times clone for the latex output, but i don't recognise the open office sample's font. probably something frighteningly modern, though rather pleasing all the same. (i agree it's impossible to do a sensible comparison of the two samples; i wouldn't have thought that either was worse than the other on present evidence.) – wasteofspace Dec 27 '12 at 19:06
@wasteofspace the LaTeX abstract is from the memoir manual which uses the URW Palladio font (which is a variant of the linotype Palatino font). The LO font looks like the default LiberationSerif font made to be a close free alternative Times New Roman (although it is not identical). – ArTourter Dec 27 '12 at 23:46
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closed as too localized by lockstep, Werner, zeroth, Stephen, Speravir Feb 15 at 21:21

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