[Tex/LaTex] What best combination of fonts for Serif, Sans, and Mono do you recommend

fontstypographyxetex

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)

Best Answer

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.

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