[twowordbird]

Somebody always posts this comment re: Computer Modern, but I've never seen anybody offer up some of these strictly superior printing fonts (of which there are apparently many). Would you care to link some examples?

[nwhitehead]

I prefer Palatino when typesetting mathematics using latex. It looks nicer than Computer Modern and is super easy to use. Nowadays I use xelatex and actual fonts instead of staying stuck in the tex font ghetto.

http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/palatino/

[jasomill]

Similarly, I've had nice results combining Zapf Renaissance Antiqua text (via XeTeX fontspec) with Palatino maths and Optima headings.

[pseut]

I've become a fan of bitstream charter lately[1], available through the mathdesign package

    \usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}

I am not a designer, but I think it looks good with adobe's source code pro[2]:

    \usepackage{sourcecodepro}

[1] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/charter/ [2] http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?event=d...

[ska]

The main problem isn't supporting other text fonts (including TTF), but the fact that those fonts don't properly support the symbols.

So all in all it's a bit of a nasty aesthetic trade-off. There are several packages that attempt to create symbol sets to match things like palatino, with varying success. Some are just terrible. And there are a few commercially available ones that do support most if not all symbols, so if it's worth a few hundred dollars to you there is that route.

Nothing has great solution for web, really. We're slowing moving from execrable to ugly but at least it is progress.

[HitherYon]

You might try the fouriernc package. I don't know if it's superior, but I do find it easier on the eyes.

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/fouriernc/

[fidotron]

Junicode is a far better classic serif, for example.