When Donald Knuth devised TeX, he attempted to recreate the expertise of traditional typesetters – there is an eloquent passage about this in “The TeXbook” which I will try to dig out – but I don’t think he had a particular style in mind (except for the fonts, which were “modern” in the style of Bodoni and Didot). I am not aware of anyone having done what you suggest!

Do you know if anyone has ever tried to recreate something like this as a latex package?

I found a slightly complicated way to fix this. Firstly I downloaded and installed the “cm-super” package on MixTex (at 66MB or so, that’s a bit of a pain). This alledgely installs scalable Type 1 fonts, but I had no luck. A bit of Googling suggested that adding the command
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
would help. And, indeed, it does! But MikTex then installed some more (small!) packages. So I don’t know if cm-super was really needed or not.

However, using the T1 encoding does change the font spacing a little bit (you see it most in, say “Two”, where the T now really hangs over the w).

Anyway, this is all getting a little beyond me. But at least I have a solution to making nice looking PDFs in the concrete font.

When Knuth produced TeX and Metafont in the late 1970s, he was far ahead of the state of computer technology at the time: Metafont contains mathematical descriptions of the characters which can then be bitmapped at any scale. But, in order for the system to be usable, the programs which converted TeX output to marks on the screen, paper, or film needed bitmapped fonts; he also put a lot of thought into questions of digitisation of font characters so that these would be as good as possible, subject to the limitations of the output devices. Back when most users had dot matrix printers, 300dpi was more than good enough.

Then came PostScript, and then PDF, which handle the issue of digitisation in a different way. I don’t know any program which turns Metafont code into PDF fonts. (There is MetaPost, which outputs PostScript; I don’t know whether this can be used directly in PDF, which I believe is a cut-down version of PostScript.) The easy way is to simply use the bitmapped characters; then, of course, they look bad at high magnification. I assume that this is what happens with the Concrete fonts (which were originally coded in Metafont).

It is easier if you are using fonts designed for PDF. All TeX needs to know are various measurements (height, width, kerning and ligature information, and so on), not what the characters look like; it positions boxes into which the actual characters are put by the output program, in this case PDF, which (presumably) knows what to do with its own characters at any scale.

But, one issue I see is that for all the example, except Computer Concrete, the fonts are lovely and smooth, even when very zoomed it. For Concrete, the fonts seem to be bitmapped, and so zooming in, you start to see the pixels. I think this was actually the problem on my office linux box– the defualt previewer is just very bad at smoothing. Any idea what Concrete is being embedded in the PDF file as a smooth font? (I guess this might have a very technical answer!)

The point about the concrete, Times and Palatino fonts is that they are very easy to use. In an ordinary LaTeX document in, say, article class, you just put in a line

\usepackage{xxxx}

at the start of the document (after the \documentclass line), where xxxx is concrete, mathptmx or mathpazo. No other changes are required.

In Beamer you then have to say

\usefonttheme{serif}

or, if you want to use sans serif headers (as I did in the examples) you say

\usefonttheme[stillsansseriflarge]{serif}

If you also want to get rid of the Beamer navigation symbols (which make no sense in a one-page document), you put in the line

\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

So, for example, here is the LaTeX source for the Palatino version:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{mathpazo}
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}
\usefonttheme[stillsansseriflarge]{serif}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{A shaggy dog story in Palatino}
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. During the jump, the position
of his centre of mass is given by $x=ut$, $y=vt-\frac{1}{2}gt^2$, and so
describes the parabola $y=(v/u)x-(g/2u^2)x^2$.

Meanwhile, the dog is lazy but she is not idle. She is contemplating a
proof strategy for showing that, if $\zeta(\sigma+\mathrm{i}t)=0$, where
$\zeta$ is the analytic continuation to the whole complex plane of the
function given by $\zeta(s)=\displaystyle{\sum_{n=0}^\infty\frac{1}{n^s}}$
for $\Re s>1$,
$\sigma$ and $t$ are real, and $t\ne0$, then $\sigma=\frac{1}{2}$.

\end{frame}
\end{document}