What are your favorite fonts for technical reports?
I work at a consulting engineering firm and write a lot of reports that are read by the public. I have an opportunity to recommend a different font for all of our written documents and am looking for something more modern/fresh than Times New Roman. Also open to recommendations for purpose specific communities about typography/fonts.
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Intel’s Clear Sans.
IBM’s Plex, I’m particularly partial to their condensed sans.
Fira Sans is a good generic recommendation, their mono is again worth considering.
Adobe’s Source family (sans, serif, mono) is another inoffensive, safe choice.
erewhon is a modern workhorse serif that pairs well with all the sans fonts above. It’s derived from Adobe’s Utopia, which is used in quite a few newspapers (clear and legible without taking too much space).
STIX Two was specifically designed to replace Times New Roman in scientific + mathematical publications, if you’re looking for a font that’s different but familiar to Times New Roman, I could not recommend it enough.
Charis SIL was originally designed for laser printers and later modified for use in linguistics, it’s essentially a serif version of Verdana (same designer too). As with all the other fonts mentioned, very broad character set support.
The TeX font catalogue is a treasure trove in general.
Edit: almost forgot, the Libertinus family also comes recommended for a more ‘professional’ look.
This is super helpful! Fun fact - Erewhon is also a small chain of very high end markets in Los Angeles. Now I'm going to have to research what this word means and who came up with it first.
Try spelling it backwards ;)
Nohwere? It’s an anagram but it’s not straight up backwards for “nowhere”, at least not quite. Presumably it’s named after the novel, which I knew nothing about before five minutes ago in any event.
Oh shit! I see it now :)