What best combination of fonts for Serif, Sans, and Mono do you recommend?

Question

Now that Xe(La)TeX is being increasingly used to deliver nifty documents, I am wondering if any recommendations have been published or discussed about the best combination of font families for mixing Serif, Sans Serif, and Monospace.

For example, I know that Kieran Healy uses a nice combination of Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, and Pragmata (a LaTeX template is available at kjh-vita). Likewise, according to the American Association of University Presses, Minion, ITC New Baskerville and FF Scala & 4. FF Scala Sans are the top three best fonts, but see Top Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners. I have been playing myself with Apple Garamond, Fontin Sans and Menlo (Apple default monospaced font shipped with OS X 10.6), because all are available with any combination of \itshape and \bfseries (as described in The XeTeX Companion).

So my question is just: What would you recommend as pretty looking and freely available fonts for typesetting a TeX or LaTeX document? Ideally, this should allow to use mathematical expressions as well. (one response per post please)

Answer 1

I prefer a combination of Linux Libertine for serif, Inconsolata for monospace and Calibri or Linux Biolinum for sans serif. Linux Libertine is burgeoning and has nice ligatures, swashes and all that, including a rather pleasing swashed capital Q. Prior to Libertine, I favoured Cambria for serif, considering it unusual but professional, but eventually decided that its serifs were far too heavy. I also considered Cambria unsuitable from the outset as a maths font, to the point that back when I used Word 2007 I fell back on Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 (i.e. the equation object available in Office) rather than the built-in equation editor. I'm not sure what font it uses but at the time I considered it nicer than maths set in CM.

Both Inconsolata and Consolas are top-notch monospace fonts.

Answer 2

I'm strictly an amateur in this department ... If you don't want to buy PragmataPro (which I love, and for me was worth buying because I use it as my default text-editing font), Bera Mono is also quite nice and it comes with texlive. Consolas/Inconsolata is great as well, as you say. Myriad Pro used to come bundled with Adobe Reader (I'm not sure about the current version). For body text, Charis SIL is a good, free descendant of Bitstream Charter. Super-complete sets from big foundries are indeed often extremely pricey, but there's also a market segment -- something like, e.g., Calluna -- where the fonts are more reasonably priced and work very well if your document is not extremely complicated in its structure. As you say, though, if you want to typeset any amount of math your choices narrow down quickly.

Answer 3

My university recommends the Microsoft family: Cambria for serif, Calibri for sans, Cambria Math for math, and Consolas for monospace. They all came with my Mac. I'm not sure that the university's recommendation is the most informed one, but those are designed to go together.

To see these in a sample document, insert the following into your preamble

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Cambria}
\setsansfont{Calibri}
\setmathrm{Cambria Math}
\setmonofont{Consolas}

(and use XeTeX.)

Answer 4

The Google Font Directory is worth browsing. It’s targeted at web authors but many (all? didn’t check) of the fonts found there are published under SIL license and thus can be used in other projects as well.

One font (also found there) that I really like is Vollkorn which has a nice, rounded, distinctive look that is still very readable.

Answer 5

Minion and Myriad always come with Acrobat Reader, for free, and can be downloaded as a font pack for Linux or found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 10.0\Resource\Font or some similar directory structure on Windows. If you ever install other Adobe products, even as a trial, you might have even more choices.

Answer 6

Palatino, Bera, and AMS Euler

I have really been enjoying AMS Euler as a math font lately. If you need completely free fonts, then I think that Palatino + Euler + Bera Serif/Sans/Mono for code, etc. is a pretty workable combination. (This is essentially the default combination used by the ClassicThesis package.) Both Palatino and Euler were designed by Hermann Zapf and work quite well together.

This combination can be used in almost any LaTeX installation, making it a viable combination for the arXiv for example. One must be a little careful to scale the Bera to match the x-height of the Palatino though, or it looks quite strange, but once this is adjusted, the combination looks quite reasonable. (Palatino Sans would probably be the best match, but is not "free".)

\documentclass{scrreprt}
\usepackage[scaled=0.88]{beraserif}
\usepackage[scaled=0.85]{berasans}
\usepackage[scaled=0.84]{beramono}
\usepackage{classicthesis}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{mathpazo}
\linespread{1.05}
\usepackage[T1,small,euler-digits]{eulervm}

\newenvironment{note}[1][Note:]{%
  \par\vspace{0.5\baselineskip}%
  \sffamily\small\linespread{1.05}\selectfont
  \noindent\ignorespaces%
  #1
}{%
  \vspace{0.5\baselineskip}%
  \par\noindent\ignorespacesafterend%
}
\usepackage{listings}
\lstset{basicstyle=\ttfamily,breaklines=true}

\setkomafont{disposition}{}
\setkomafont{section}{}
\titleformat{\section}
            {\usekomafont{disposition}\usekomafont{section}}
            {\llap{\textsc{\MakeTextLowercase{\thesection}}\hspace{0.7em}}}
            {0pt}
            {\usekomafont{disposition}\usekomafont{section}\spacedlowsmallcaps}

\newcommand{\I}{\mathrm{i}}
\begin{document}
\chapter{Introduction}
\section{Palatino and Bera with Euler}
This style use Palatino for a body font, with $AMS\ Euler$ font for math: $y =
\sin(x)$:
\begin{equation}
  y = \int_0^x\cos(x)\,\mathrm{d}{x} = \frac{e^{\I x} - e^{-\I x}}{2\I}
\end{equation}
Both fonts were designed by Hermann Zapf and work quite well together
as long as you use the small characters --
\lstinline|\usepackage[small,euler-digits]{eulervm}|.  Code listings, etc. can
be typeset with \texttt{Bera Mono} to give it a slightly different feel.  Again:
you must be careful to scale this appropriately --
\lstinline|\usepackage[scaled=0.88]{beraserif}| and
\lstinline|\usepackage[scaled=0.85]{berasans}|, and
\lstinline|usepackage[scaled=0.84]{beramono}|.

\begin{note}
  I sometimes use Bera Sans for extended admonitions like this one so that they
  can quickly be separated from the text.
\end{note}

\end{document}

Answer 7

There's a nice, well-thought-out, apposite link here, though it doesn't adhere to the serif, sans, mono schema: http://laymanslayout.wordpress.com/freefacing/

Edit: After several hours of searching, I think Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum is the safest, most convenient combination for Linux users. They look good together, and you get ligatures, small caps, etc. I tried to find something that would work well with LidoSTF, and Cabin almost fit the bill, but something seemed off. In any case, Libertine has more features than Lido, and is GPL.

Answer 8

How about the Lucida family? It is not free, but very nice.

Answer 9

I like Courier (note: not Courier New!) for mono, Marion for roman, and Cambria Math for math. They are a bit different weight, but scaling to x-height helps. Unfortunately, it should be mentioned, Marion lacks smallcaps.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[fleqn]{amsmath}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmainfont{Marion}
\setmathfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Cambria Math}
\setmonofont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Courier}
\setlength{\textwidth}{24pc}
\setlength{\parindent}{1em}
\fvset{xleftmargin=2\parindent}
\begin{document}
\noindent
A number $n>1$ is prime if it cannot be written as a product of two integers $a$ and~$b$, both of which are larger than~$1$: \[
  n = a \cdot b.
\]

Here, have a \verb|primes| stream:
\begin{Verbatim}
(define (sieve s)
  (cons-stream
    (head s)
    (sieve (filter
            (lambda (x)
              (not
                (divisible? x (head s))))
            (tail s)))))

(define primes
  (sieve (integers-from 2)))
\end{Verbatim}
\end{document}

It looks like this: