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Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography (2017)
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
Because pre-Internet printing required so many steps, so many different people, so much physical craftsmanship, and so much waiting, there were more artistic layers between the author’s original thoughts and the final arrangement of letters and figures on pages. This wide variety of type styles and sizes made if [sic] costly to set text with even moderately complex mathematics, since so much time and effort went into composing the material by hand at the make-up stage. There is no better example than Roel Zinkstok’s comparison of the first paragraph of Moby Dick set using Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, and pdfLaTeX (a LaTeX macro package that outputs TeX directly to PDF).
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