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| Category | Serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Didone |
| Designer | Donald Knuth |
| License | SIL Open Font License |
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| Sample | |
Computer Modern is the original family oftypefaces used by the typesetting programTeX. It was created byDonald Knuth with hisMetafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992.[1] Computer Modern and its variants remain very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use ofmathematical notation.
Computer Modern is a "Didone", or modernserif font, a genre that emerged in the late 18th century as a contrast to the more organic designs that preceded them. Didone fonts have high contrast between thick and thin elements, and their axis of "stress" or thickening is perfectly vertical. Computer Modern was specifically based on the 10 point size of the AmericanLanston Monotype Company's Modern Extended 8A, part of a family Monotype originally released in 1896.[2][3] This was one of many modern faces issued by typefounders and Monotype around this period, and the standard style for body text printing in the late nineteenth century.[4][5]
In creating the TeX publishing system, Knuth was influenced by the history of mathematics and a desire to achieve the "classic style" of books printed in metal type.[6][7] Modern faces were used extensively for printing mathematics, especially beforeTimes New Roman became popular for mathematics printing from the 1950s.[8][9][10]
The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with Knuth'sMetafont system, one of the few typefaces developed in this way. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence ofserifs orold-style numerals, whether dots such as the dot on the "i" are square or rounded, and the degree of "superness" in the bowls of lowercase letters such as "g" and "o". This allows Metafont designs to be processed in unusual ways; Knuth has shown effects such as morphing in demonstrations, where one font slowly transitions into another over the course of a text.[11] While it attracted attention for the concept, Metafont has been used by few other font designers; by 1996 Knuth commented "asking an artist to become enough of a mathematician to understand how to write a font with 60 parameters is too much"[12] while digital-period font designerJonathan Hoefler commented in 2015 that "Knuth's idea that letters start with skeletal forms is flawed".[13]
Knuth produced his original Computer Modern fonts usingMetafont, a program that reads stroke-based definitions of glyphs and outputs ready-to-use fonts as bitmap image files. He mostly left the font, as with other components of TeX (with the exception of the TeX and Metafont names themselves, a stipulation Knuth made to maintainquality control), in thepublic domain.[14][15]
The advance of publishing technology (PostScript,PDF,laser printers) has reduced the need for bitmap fonts. The preferred formats are nowoutline fonts such asType 1,TrueType, orOpenType, which can be rendered efficiently at arbitrary resolution and using sophisticated anti-aliasing techniques by printer firmware or on-screen document viewers. Therefore, several other projects have ported the Computer Modern fonts into such formats. Some of these projects have also complemented Computer Modern with
Several such derivatives are now also widely used and included inTeX Live, a modern TeX distribution.
A current extended release of the Computer Modern family in the general-purposeOpenType format is the CMU distribution (for Computer ModernUnicode):
CMU is released under theSIL Open Font License.
Computer Modern was first transformed to aPostScript Type 3 font format by BlueSky, Inc. in 1988, and then toType 1 in 1992 to includefont hinting.[16] The Type 1 version has since then been donated to theAmerican Mathematical Society (AMS) which distributes them freely under the Open Font License.[17] It is found in most standard TeX distributions.
The Latin Modern implementation, maintained byBogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki ofTeX User Group Poland (GUST), is now standard in theTeX community and was made through aMetafont/MetaPost derivative calledMETATYPE1. It was derived from the BlueSky Type 1 fonts, which were converted back into outline-based METATYPE1 programs, from which then the extended Type 1 and OpenType Latin Modern fonts were developed.ConTeXt uses Latin Modern as default font, instead of Computer Modern.[18]
The Type 1 to METATYPE1 to Type 1 round-trip conversion process involved in the production of the Latin Modern fonts tried to preserve the hinting information of the BlueSky fonts; however, it introducedrounding errors that affect the quality of the hinting at low pixel sizes. As a result, on-screen display of the Latin Modern fonts can result in a less even display of kerning and character heights than with the BlueSky fonts.[19]
The same process was later extended to some free PostScript font clones under the umbrella projectTeX Gyre.[20]
The Latin Modern font has also gained anOpenType math table.[21][22] Unlike Computer Modern Math, Latin Modern Math has no pairwise kerning information: OpenType math rendering does not make use of this type of kerning, making such information useless.[23]
The New Computer Modern font family[24] is a large extension in terms of the number of additional glyphs of the Latin Modern fonts which adds support for several more languages such as Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Cherokee and Coptic. This font family comes in three weights, "Regular", "Book", and "Bold". The book weight is supposed to look slightly heavier compared to the "Regular". All three weights include support for typesetting mathematics; complete coverage of Unicode math blocks is provided, along with some more glyphs needed for mathematics. Additionally, the New Computer Modern family includessans-serif text and math fonts.
MLModern[25] is based on the Latin Modern font. It avoids the spindliness of most other Type 1 versions of Computer Modern and hence looks thicker in comparison to Latin Modern or Computer Modern.
A visual comparison of Computer Modern, Latin Modern, New Computer Modern Book and MLModern is shown here.
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, modern faces held the typographic field against nearly all comers. Not all typefounders and punch-cutters were very enthusiastic about this kind of type-face, but the popular demand had to be met.
In the early 1900s Monotype adapted a number of modern roman text faces to its system, mostly in a few small sizes only; some of them differ from each other only in slight changes of their proportions.
All of the methods described in these books are in the public domain; thus anybody can freely use any of the ideas. The only thing I'm retaining control of is the names, TeX and METAFONT(...) If any changes are made, I won't complain, as long as the changed systems are not called TEX or METAFONT.
{{cite book}}:|journal= ignored (help)and which he (Leslie Lamport), like Don, placed in the public domain.
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