Genuine question : why are all those fonts serif ones? I personnaly find them much harder to read than sans serif ones (including when printed on paper, not just on screens).
I thought the whole point of serif fonts is that they are easier to read.
But the author addresses your question:
> This survey focuses on serif fonts as these are the usual choice for longer documents such as articles or books (although sans-serifs have become more popular for longer text in recent years). However, in keeping with the reasoning above, I have also selected accompanying sans-serif fonts for each of the seven roman choices below (all of which have maths support of some form or another).
I think the general idea is that Serif-fonts are better readable in book style documents and Sans-Serif fonts are better for short documents or maybe computer displays.
It is likely that you find them harder to read mostly because you are less habituated to them.
For many of the older generations, who have spent their childhood reading thousands of books printed using serif fonts, at a time when there was no easy access to computer terminals, serif fonts are easier to read.
In general, the readability of a typeface is determined more by other features than by whether it is has or it does not have serifs.
The sans serif typefaces have appeared first after the Napoleonic wars, as simplified typefaces, suitable for low-quality printing used for titles or advertisements that should be readable from a distance.
Having simplified letter forms, sans serif typefaces remain preferable for low-resolution displays of for very small text or for text that must be read from a great distance.
However, until WWII, the simplification of the letter forms has been pushed too far, resulting in many letters that are too similar, so they can no longer be distinguished. There are many such sans serif typefaces that have been modified very little from their pre-WWII ancestors, like Helvetica and Arial, which are too simplified so that they should be avoided in any computing applications due to the great probability of misreading anything that is not plain English.
After WWII, and especially after 1990, there has been a reversal in the evolution of the sans serif typefaces, away from excessive simplification and towards making them more similar to serif typefaces, except for the serifs.
A well-known example of such a sans-serif typeface is FF Meta (Erik Spiekermann, 1991), but it had a lot of imitators. Such non-simplified sans-serifs typefaces have e.g. traditional Caroline shapes for the lower-case "a", "g" and "l" and also true italic variants (i.e. not just oblique variants).
Besides the removal of serifs, a traditional simplification in the sans serif typefaces is the removal of the contrast between thin lines and thick lines, making the thickness of the lines uniform. At least for me, any long text printed with a font with uniform line thickness looks boring, so I strongly prefer the sans serif fonts that go even further in their resemblance with serif fonts, by having thin lines and thick lines, for example Optima nova and Palatino Sans.
While any sans serif typeface by definition does not have serifs, when Hermann Zapf has designed Optima (which was released in 1958), he has found an alternative to serifs, which achieves a similar optical effect. Starting from a line that has the form of a long rectangle, instead of attaching serifs to the ends, one can make the 2 lateral long edges of the rectangle concave, instead of flat. After that, one has 2 alternatives for how to terminate the ends of the line. The first is to also make concave the 2 short terminal edges. This results in sharp corners for the line and it is the solution chosen by Zapf in Optima. The second method of line termination is to keep the terminal edges flat or even slightly convex and to round the corners where they meet the concave lateral edges. This is the method chosen by Akira Kobayashi in Palatino Sans (2006), under the influence of the similar line terminations used in Cooper Black and in the rounded sans-serif typefaces that are popular for public signage in Japan.
This alternative to serifs, with concave lateral edges, is in my opinion superior both to serifs and to classic sans serifs, but unfortunately it is effective only on very high-resolution displays or on paper (even a cheap laser printer has better resolution than the most expensive monitors), because on low resolution monitors any slightly concave edges will become straight.
In any case, for the best readability, I never use fonts with ambiguous characters, like Helvetica/Arial and most other sans serifs. Instead of that, serif fonts are better, but even better are good modern sans serifs which have been designed carefully, to have distinctive characters. With good monitors, fonts with contrast between thin lines and thick lines, or even with concave lateral line edges, are preferable.
I read this HN thread rendered in the Palatino Sans mentioned in TFA (with the italic of Palatino nova configured as its italic form; the italic of Palatino Sans Informal is also a good choice, but I prefer a stronger contrast between the regular and the italic variants of a font; that is why I have also configured the italic of Bauer Bodoni as the italic for Optima nova).
While in TFA Palatino Sans was dismissed with regret, for having to be purchased, I have bought Palatino Sans, together with a few other high-quality typefaces and I use them on Linux, instead of the available free fonts. I consider the money that I have spent on good typefaces as some of the best purchasing decisions that I have made.
However, for CLI/TUI applications and program editing, I use the free JetBrains Mono. Unlike for regular text, for programming there are many high-quality free fonts, but I prefer JetBrains Mono because it supports an extended character set, with many Unicode mathematical symbols that are missing in other programming fonts.
So there is this rumor hanging around the french community that use Coq, that the name was deliberately chosen to sound like "cock" in english. This way, french researcher could brag to other collegues about going to a conference about "cock", in all seriousness.
"I do not intend to publish or republish any work or text of which I am the author, ... Any edition or dissemination of such texts which have been made in the past without my consent, or which will be made in the future and as long as I live, is against my will expressly specified here and is unlawful in my eyes. ... If my intentions, clearly expressed here, should go unheeded, then the shame of it falls on those responsible for the illegal editions, and those responsible for the libraries concerned"
The first rule "do not learn what you do not understand" is nonesense in the context of learning mathematics/physics/hard sciences.
If you understand a subject, then it means that you have learned it effectively.
In my experience with teaching at university, I have found that the wish of students to understand before learning is actually a great barrier to comprehend a subject.
In order to build intuition on a subject, a student should first try to apply it, play with it (without understanding it) and then understanding will come. But I have yet to witness a student which understand a subject without being able to use/apply the subject.
Take the notion of electric field. You could try to understand it before learning how to use it. Good luck. You are not a fish, so you probably have no sensors of electric field on your skin, and thus you have no prior notion to cling to.
I contend that it is virtually impossible. Or you could try to use the concept of electric field to compute forces on charged particle, or compute the electric field created by a charge, or you could build a program that represent the electric field in space. Doing this requires no understanding, just boring substitutions in the definition of the electric field. But doing that forces you to build understanding (its a vector, it changes direction with the sign of the charges, etc, etc)
Another example is understanding how to bike. You could try to understand how balancing on a bike so that it stay upright, understand how moving the handlebar right makes you turn left or, you could just try to bike, and then understand how it works out.
So my advice: don't try to understand. Do, and do again untill you have learned. Not the other way around.
As a kid I cried at times because learning foreign words, lists of topological places, or events in history was so hard! If I don't get the structure or context I am so lost.
At electrical engineering they still tried to teach me in the same way. Giving me assignments with little context. What saved me in the end were textbooks and the internet.
The easiest way for me to understand new concepts are the subsequent generalizations or extremes. Complex numbers? Quaternions. Gradients? Clifford algebra. Sets? Categories. Fourier transform? Wavelets.
Sure there might be people who benefit from solving the puzzles from their teachers, but it assumes that every mind works the same way.
I'm the same way. At university, I had an instructor for Calculus I who seemed content with just having us memorize formulas and identities and "shortcuts", only to regurgitate them on demand. I barely passed with a C-. Then, I had an instructor for Calculus II who was much the same. I made a D+ in Calc II, which, since Calculus I-III are considered essential courses for engineering students, was not passing. My second time through Calc II, I barely passed with a C-.
Then, I get to Calculus III, and my instructor introduces each concept by showing us a complicated-but-ultimately-intuitive formula for something, then deriving the "shortcut" step-by-step. While most of the students griped that it was boring, I found it quite interesting, and for the first time in my university career I felt like I could grasp calculus. I made an A-.
There are other instances of this, as well, but that one was probably the most dramatic. I don't know what it is. I came up with a handful of analogies just now, but none of them seemed particularly satisfying, so I gave up. Perhaps it's just a quirk, I dunno :)
double this. Practicing is useless, if you dont have motivation where you can apply this knowledge. I wish i could go back in time and learn the math in university once again after failing to understand things in stat and ml. just because missing basics things what i "practiced" in the past without understanding it...
I took understanding as meaning motivation. If I was teaching electric fields I wouldn't start with the equations. Perhaps I'd start by demonstrating what an electric field is (e.g. http://practicalphysics.org/electric-fields.html), then perhaps how it's useful, and then open the discussion of what it's properties are. You can then relate the properties back to the demonstrations and applications.
> So my advice: don't try to understand. Do, and do again untill you have learned. Not the other way around.
This is so so true so some level I think our desire to understand everything beforehand is just a lazy strategy. Probably either to learn only what is easy or what is useful. Sense of wonder and discoverablity which makes putting the effort in a joyous activity is gone from us. Our profit mazi
On the contrary Children just keep practising until they learn. I wish I can go back to stage where my 2 years old daughter is.
