My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.
It’s hard to see Palatino and Garamond as similar, but perhaps that’s just my typographic training at play. Palatino is much closer to its calligraphic origins than Garamond and has a darker color on the page (the seldom seen Palatino Book weight is a great improvement over the Palatino Medium that’s the default Palatino weight for extended text).
Note also that Palatino was originally designed for Linotype hot metal typesetting and has incorporated in its design the limitations of that system (which, in some ways is actually a bonus for naïve digital setting where ligatures may be limited or non-existent). The most obvious case of this is the lack of character kerns—that is, characters cannot extend beyond their typeset width. This makes the italics look cramped since, e.g., d, l and f cannot reach over the following letter with their ascenders.
They are both derived from medieval scripts and they have fairly bold serifs, right? Would you agree that they are more similar to each other than to Times New Roman or Computer Modern (which I both dislike for their thin and pointy serifs)?
Back in school we were told essays had to be submitted (as paper printouts, this was early 2000s of course) in Times. The rebel that I am, I submitted them set in Baskerville as I loved how much better it looked.
As the only oldstyle font in the "original 35" Postscript desktop publishing fonts (think "original seven" Mercury astronauts), Palatino saw overuse. Among some designers it's second only to Comic Sans for its amateur use infamy.
I'm among the guilty. Palatino does appear spread out compared to alternatives, for better or worse.
The article does note that Palatino was originally designed for display text. I had long heard that Hermann Zapf was horrified at its adoption as a body font, which I couldn't confirm. The best I could do was to find a quote,
"One day I got up the nerve to ask 'Mr Zapf, what do you do?' He replied, 'I correct the errors of my youth.'"
If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.