best latex font for thesis

What font should I choose for my thesis?

This post is by DrJanene Carey, a freelance writer and editor based in Armidale NSW. She occasionally teaches academic writing at the University of New England and often edits academic theses, articles and reports. Her website is http://www.janenecarey.com

Arguably, this question is a classic time waster and the student who poses it should be told to just get on with writing up their research. But as someone who edits theses for a living, I think a bit of time spent on fonts is part of the process of buffing and polishing what is, after all, one of the most important documents you will ever produce. Just bear in mind that there is no need to immerse yourself so deeply in the topic that you start quibbling about whether it’s a font or a typeface that you are choosing .

Times New Roman is the standard choice for academic documents, and the thesis preparation guidelines of some universities stipulate its use. For many years, it was the default body text for Microsoft Word. With the release of Office 2007, the default became a sans serif typeface called Calibri. Lacking the little projecting bits (serifs) at the end of characters makes Calibri and its many friends, such as Arial, Helvetica and Verdana, look smoother and clearer on a screen, but generally makes them less readable than a serif typeface when used for printed text . The other problem with choosing a sans serif for your body text is that if you want passages in italics (for example, lengthy participant quotes) often this will be displayed as slanted letters, rather than as a true italic font.

You would like your examiners to feel as comfortable as possible while their eyes are traversing the many, many pages of your thesis, so maximising legibility and readability is a good idea. Times New Roman is ubiquitous and familiar, which means it is probably the safest option, but it does have a couple of drawbacks. Originally designed for The Times in London, its characters are slightly narrowed, so that more of them can be squished into a newspaper column. Secondly, some people intensely dislike TNR because they think it has been overused, and regard it as the font you choose when you are not choosing a font .

If you do have the luxury of choice (your university doesn’t insist you use Times New Roman, and you have defined document styles that are easy to modify, and there’s enough time left before the submission deadline) then I think it is worth considering what other typefaces might work well with your thesis. I’m not a typographical expert, but I have the following suggestions.

• Don’t use Calibri, or any other sans serif font, for your body text, though it is fine for headings. Most people agree that dense chunks of printed text are easier to read if the font is serif, and examiners are likely to expect a typeface that doesn’t stray too far from the standard. To my eye, Calibri looks a little too casual for the body of a thesis.
• Typefaces like Garamond, Palatino, Century Schoolbook, Georgia, Minion Pro, Cambria and Constantia are all perfectly acceptable, and they come with Microsoft Word. However, some of them (Georgia and Constantia, for example) feature non-lining numerals, which means that instead of all sitting neatly on the base line, some will stand higher or lower than others, just like letters do. This looks nice when they are integrated with the text, but it is probably not what you want for a tabular display.
• Consider using a different typeface for your headings. It will make them more prominent, which enhances overall readability because the eye scanning the pages can quickly take in the hierarchy of ideas. The easiest way to get a good contrast with your serif body text is to have sans serif headings. Popular combinations are Garamond/Helvetica; Minion Pro/Myriad Pro; Times New Roman/Arial Narrow. But don’t create a dog’s breakfast by having more than two typefaces in your thesis – use point sizes, bold and italics for variety.

Of late, I’ve become quite fond of Constantia. It’s an attractive serif typeface that came out with Office 2007 at the same time as Calibri, and was specifically designed to look good in print and on screen. Increasingly, theses will be read in PDF rather than book format, so screen readability is an important consideration.  Asked to review Microsoft’s six new ClearType fonts prior to their release, typographer Raph Levien said Constantia was likely to be everyone’s favourite, because ‘Even though it’s a highly readable Roman font departing only slightly from the classical model, it still manages to be fresh and new.’

By default, Constantia has non-lining numerals, but from Word 2010 onwards you can set them to be lining via the advanced font/number forms option, either throughout your document or in specific sections, such as within tables.

Here is an excerpt from a thesis, shown twice with different typefaces. The first excerpt features Calibri headings with Constantia body text, and the second has that old favourite, Times New Roman. As these examples have been rendered as screenshots, you will get a better idea of how the fonts actually look if you try them on your own computer and printer.

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Best margins for master thesis written in LaTeX

I'm writing my Master's Thesis with LaTeX and I'd like to know what are the best margins I should use.

My university doesn't force any template. LaTeX default margins seems to me too large. Do you have any recommendation?

In addition, I would like to know if I should keep two different margins for even and odd pages. I'm using the book class.

• The manual for the "memoir" document class has a long introduction to typography and design, while still being relatively accessible. texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/memoir/memman.pdf –  Oswald Veblen Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 14:11
• The best one is the one in the latex class template provided by your university. –  eykanal Commented Dec 31, 2014 at 14:51

2 Answers 2

Your question may not be completely appropriate for academia.sx but probably not for TeX.sx either.

Anyway. rather than focussing on the width of margins you can consider the width of the text area. Research (I do not have references at hand at the moment) has shown that around 65 (within the range 45-75) characters per line is optimal. This means that if you switch type face or size, the number of characters will change. Hence the same text area may not be optimal for 10, 11 and 12 pt or conversely your text optimal area will change with type face and size. To some extent, this is built into LaTeX which is at least partly why the margins may seem less than optimal.

So to approach the question of margins, try to select the type face and the type size you want to use and then check the resulting text area size for line lengths between 45 and 75 focussing around 65 characters.

The question of right and left page margins is a matter of simplicity. If you centre the text area on the page the areas will appear the same on all pages. When viewed as a pdf the text will not move around from page to page which can be slightly annoying, particularly if inside and outside margins have widely different widths. So will your text be read frequently in digital format use simple margins, if the print is important differing in- and outside margins may be preferable. Just make sure any printer does not screw up the margins by removing or missing printing blank pages that will result in a shift of left and right hand pages.

You can find a good and easy-to-read resource on changing margins with the typearea package here: http://www.khirevich.com/latex/page_layout/ A more detailed discussion of margins, text density and binding corrections is found in the manual for the KOMA-script bundle (which, incidentally, is a good alternative to book if you want a class that guides you more directly in the formatting of a long document).

Asymmetric margins can be obtained with the twoside option to book .

• 1 I am sorry, but i cannot recommend a page that talks about page margins and screws up left and right hand pages in all screenshots. +1 for the KOMA mention, though. –  Johannes_B Commented Dec 28, 2015 at 17:39

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LaTeX forum ⇒ Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Which font is best for a physics book?

Which font is best for a physics book?

Post by Cham » Mon Dec 09, 2019 1:18 pm

Recommended reading 2024:

Post by Stefan Kottwitz » Mon Dec 09, 2019 4:42 pm

Post by Cham » Mon Dec 09, 2019 8:38 pm

Post by Stefan Kottwitz » Tue Dec 10, 2019 1:38 am

Post by Ijon Tichy » Tue Dec 10, 2019 10:14 am

As an approximate measure, the Big delimiters are one and a half times as large (11.5pt) as big delimiters; bigg ones are twice (14.5pt), and Bigg ones are two and a half times as large (17.5pt).

Post by rahulchoudhary » Wed Dec 11, 2019 11:51 am

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Math fonts that worth noting

Solutions taken from ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/survey.html in TUG.

Times-resemble math font

Use either txfonts or mathptmx for Times font support. I personally prefer txfonts since its mathcal symbols look more natural to me.

To use: include \usepackage{txfonts} or \usepackage{mathptmx} in the preamble.

Sans math font

Personally the most comfortable Sans Serif fonts are Palatino or Kerkis. The usage is a bit different:

• Palatino: use any of the following: pxfonts , mathpazo or mathpple . For me pxfonts looks more professional like in textbooks.
• Kerkis: need to include \usepackage{kmath,kerkis}

Optionally kurier or arev can also be used. But I don’t their appearances.

The sfmath package with no Greek font support. You need to include additionally the sansmathfonts package to enable Greek fonts, but again the support for some features like mathcal or mathscr are broken.

Artistic-designed fonts

For art-type fonts that may appear on cover, I recommend to use the euler or eulervm . The latter can handle missing fonts as closest resemblance to ComputerModern.

darylz commented May 26, 2023

Thank you so much! BTW mathpazo and mathpple are so similar.

Sorry, something went wrong.

alchem0x2A commented May 26, 2023

Just notices how much the TeX community has evolved over years! Now my main workflows use XeTeX / LuaTeX with unicodemath. STIX2-math and Fira-math are quite good and stable to use for serif / sans purposes.

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Common fonts used in writing a thesis in Mathematics [closed]

I am writing my thesis in Mathematics but I am not happy with the default fonts of the template that I am using. So kindly inform me what are the common fonts used in thesis along with the latex commands for those fonts.

• 2 I like Charter with Utopia math, and with Bera mono font. \usepackage{utopia}\usepackage{XCharter}\usepackage{beramono} with the correct scalings, which I don't remember. –  Manuel Commented Jun 17, 2014 at 14:27
• I suggest you peruse the following posting: tex.stackexchange.com/q/59702/5001 . –  Mico Commented Jun 17, 2014 at 14:36

2 Answers 2

I like this combination:

I use this combination with LuaLaTeX.

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Best software to for writing an academic thesis.

I wrote two theses using overleaf and have been quite happy with it, but have been thinking of switching to software. There seems to be a lot available out there and I'm not sure what the real differences are. I have been using Atom for some C++ coding recently and quite like it, but I'm not sure if it's missing any features that the more popular editors might have.

I'm writing about chemistry, so there won't be a lot of graphs, code or formulas in there. I do care a lot about having an easy time citing, so any integration with mendeley (or zotero) would be amazing. One of the reasons I'm moving away from overleaf is so I don't have to constantly reupload my bibtex.

Edit: Everyone thanks for the comments. I will definitely make the swap from mendeley to zotero to use the biblatex format (I was already exporting to bibtex for overleaf, but reuploading everytime was annoying), and it appears the browser extension for zotero syncs automatically rather than manually.

I don't like the in line rendering so TeXmacs and LyX don't seem great. TexStudio has the advantage of all the latex suggestions and selectable symbols etc. that seems really nice. As far as I can see Atom/ Visual study code/ Vim seem somewhat interchangeable. I will start with setting up my atom with different packages and seeing if I like it more than TexStudio (I want to start using git(hub) so Atom has that as an advantage).

More suggestions greatly appreciated :)

Edit 2: In case anyone else ends up thinking about the same thing in the future, in the end I went for writing in VS code. My motivation for choosing it over atom was that they are pretty similar, but since both are owned by Microsoft VS code is getting more support. As a nice little bonus it's easier to set up and the standard extension is quite similar to the symbol pane in TexStudio. It has decently easy git(hub) integration (though not as nice as atom). And the user snippets are very practical for getting my standard figure insert every time. noteworthy packages and settings:

-LaTeX workshop

-LaTeX utilities

-Snippet Creator (I was having a small fight with the program defining them, this makes it a lot easier)

-settings: toggle word wrap to on, turn minimap off (I think it's distracting), keybind hiding the side panel (usefull but ugly/distracting), Snippets Prevent Quick Suggestion off (for ease in the mentioned figure snipped)

-not VS code but still, I use Zotero with the better bibtex package, definitely feels better than mendeley.

Final note, I don't think the improvement over Overleaf is super big, if you're just starting out I would definitely recommend that since it feels easier to get started. One last big thank you to every that responded!

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