Minion Pro (a serif font for body text) and Myriad Pro (a sans serif font for section headings) are beautiful fonts to use when writing papers. In my opinion, they make a well-written paper even more pleasant to read. I first saw Minion Pro used in a SIGCOMM paper from MSR, and I’ve been using it ever since, including in my dissertation.
Unfortunately, installing new fonts in LaTeX is complicated. It requires dozens of steps and a simple typo in any one of them can lead to hours of unneeded headaches. This is why I was ecstatic to find a git repository that automates installing these fonts. You can find it here: https://github.com/sebschub/FontPro. Just be sure to run the install script as sudo. Also, after installing each font, type:
sudo updmap-sys –enable Map <font name>.map
Below, you can find a sample of published papers that use Minion Pro and/or Myriad Pro. Also, Apple uses a modified version of Myriad (called AppleMyriad) as their corporate typeface.
- Diagnosing performance changes in distributed systems by comparing request flows. Raja R. Sambasivan. PhD Dissertation. May 2013. (Minion Pro is used for the body text and Myriad Pro is used for section headings.)
- Jockey: Guaranteed Job Latency in Data Parallel Clusters. Andrew D. Ferguson, Peter Bodik, Srikanth Kandula, Eric Boutin, Rodrigo Fonseca. Eursosys’12. (Minion Pro is used for the body text and section headings.)
- Detailed Diagnosis in Enterprise Networks. Srikanth Kandula, Ratul Mahajan, Patrick Verkaik, Sharad Agarwal, Jitendra Padhye, Paramvir Bahl. SIGCOMM’09. (Minion Pro is used for the body text and Helvetica is used for section headings.)
Ilari
I am glad you’re sharing this with the world! May more beautiful papers be upon us soon.
The existence of that git repo also makes me very happy. It does have Windows setup instructions, though if you happen to be of that persuasion and don’t have/want Cygwin, this guide (despite its seeming sketchiness) does work:
http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=core&module=attach§ion=attach&attach_id=502489