Some applause for the Times new roman font

In the TeX community and in the Scribus community as well there is the shared understanding available that the default font Times new roman should be replaced by something which looks better. In the forum there are many individual recommendations available which alternative type1 font may look smoother, easier to read and more professional. A typical description is, that the Times font looks bad, but the recent discovered Pallatine / Utopia or Latin modern roman fonts looks so much better designed.

On the first look there is a clear difference between the default times font and other serif fonts. For most users, the times font looks to narrow and they are preferring a more wider font. The interesting situation is that subjective description has nothing to do with the Times font itself but width its current parameter. In the character setting of Libreoffice or any other word processor it is possible to change parameters like font size and very important the width scaling.

In the lower part of the screenshot, the times font was made wider while the latin modern font was reduced in the width and the surprising situation is, that all the fonts are looking equal. Not a certain font looks familiar but a certain scaling factor of this fonts. Basically spoken the Times font looks great always and if the user likes to get a new look he can make the font more wider.

 

Perhaps some detail information are helping to repeat this experiment. The default serif font in the postscript language is Times new roman. Apart from Times there are only Helvetica, and Courier available but both are not proportional serif fonts. With this restricted post script situation the user has no choice. He can either use the Times font or doesn't print the document at all.

If the user likes to replace Times with a different font there is no need to search for a new fontface, but the user has to adjust the scaling parameter in the postscript language. In the lower example, the same liberation font was used. The reason why it looks different is because the width was scaled up by 10%. That means all the characters are stretched by 10% and this make the font look more like Pallatino, Garamond or any other Times alternative.