I don't know whether it's my brain, or my pdf reader, or a missing font on my system. I know I'm asking for Latin Modern, Sans Serif because it's for a presentation, and the result looks weird:
I underlined in red the kerning that seems weird to me. In addition, the stroke of some letters look way too thin (x, y, e) compared to others.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Full code there:
\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{beamerthemelined}
\usecolortheme[rgb={0.4,0.2,0.4}]{structure}
\title{Let's look at some fonts.}
\author{Niriel}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\section{Meh}
\frame{
It's funny, I would have expected that font to look much better.
}
\end{document}
What other fonts could I use?
Best Answer
Knuth is not a professional font designer and Computer Modern was his first font, so it suffers from various problems (some shapes like the sans serif "a" are very poor, the kerning could be improved, etc.). But here, your problem is one of hinting : due to the resolution of the screen, just moving the letters one pixel to the left/right would mean much better result. Unfortunately, there's nothing really you can do as it depends on the operating system, the PDF reader, etc. For example, on my screen, here is what I see when I compile your document (a bit better than your screenshot):
If you want better results, I would recommend switching to Myriad Pro by using XeLaTeX. It's a much better designed typeface and should be available if you have Acrobat Reader installed.
(In the above code, I've used
\ifxetex
so that the document always compiles, even if you usepdflatex
. Of course, it will only use Myriad when compiled withxelatex
.)