As I recall from over 40 years ago when I was involved in a company (CTI) typesetting mathematics by computer (PDP-10) for many of the math-filled journals and textbooks, the lower case Greek letter nu also looked a lot like italic v. We were able to use the standard Times font family, which has a rather beautiful italic, because we were very careful about kerning. Some years later, Knuth, who seemed unaware of the finer points of typesetting, had to design his own italic fonts to be more vertical so that letters wouldn't smash into each other. On 06-Mar-15 03:53, Hilarie Orman wrote:
CM uses nearly identical "bowls" for the bottom of the italic u and v; this contributes to a pleasing smoothness to the page layout, but the two letters are very similar.
Zapf designed fonts in which the two letters contrast more. The u might have a straight lefthand side, and the v could be more rounded, or the u might be rounded, but the v would be angular.
For calligraphy, I quite like the sharp angle at the bottom of a v, but when writing by hand, there are many opportunities to ameliorate the jarring angle with other visual aspects of the page layout. With typography, you have to choose the trade-offs once and for all.
No matter what font you are using for math, I think it would be a good idea to avoid mixing u and v closely. There are so many other good pairings to choose from.
Hilarie
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