John Gruber has a very interesting—at least for those of us who obsess about typography—post on the fonts used by the various federal courts of appeal. For those of you who don’t know, the courts are very strict about the written format of their decisions and of the briefs filed with them. Not only is there a fixed and rigid format, the font used is also specified. Failure to adhere to the standard is prima facie reason for rejecting the filing. That said, each district has it’s own standards and choice of font. Some of those are particularly ugly versions of Courier and others are beautiful fonts such as Century Schoolbook and Equity.
The Supreme Court—which used to insist on hot-metal typeset documents—uses Century Schoolbook. Take a look at Gruber’s post for the interesting details.
None of this would be Irreal fodder except for a thread on the TUHS mailing list about LaTeX versus Troff for typesetting. Some of the discussion involved the difference between the input languages but a surprising amount talked about fonts as if Troff was still being run on a C/
A/T typesetter with a single fixed font. In fact, both typesetters can use just about any font although it is true that the output from each does have a distinctive look.
I wrote two books for a major publisher and typeset them using Troff so at the time I could probably have been considered a Troff expert. Then I started using Lisp and partly as a result I moved to Emacs. Since then, I do all my writing in Org mode, which, of course, uses LaTeX for producing typeset output.
Sadly, these days I can’t be considered an expert in either Troff or LaTeX but it doesn’t really matter because Emacs has me covered. I simply write in Org mode and get great results for printed content. I still know enough LaTeX to tweak my results if I need to so I have the best of both worlds: the ease of Org and the power of LaTeX.