Fonts for a Modern Map?

[UNoahGuy]

Basically what the title says. What fonts should I try to use in a map if I want it to look like a modern political map?

[Diamond]

I've used Vijaya to good effect, also good old Times Roman in italics, Kertayasa, and MoolBoran.

[Hai-Etlik]

One thing that's really good to have is multiple optical sizes. Unfortunately that's not all that common. Anything originally designed as a Metafont for use in TeX is probably available in multiple optical sizes. Computer Modern is (The standard TeX font) and its variants like Latin Modern are particularly varied. It also has the nice feature of coming in a matched pair of serif and sans-serif, if your map needs both, you should be careful to pick fonts that go well together.

Map labels also need to be highly legible in a visually dense environment so qualities that benefit that like a large x-height are good. A wide range of weights (Such as gradations of weight between the usual roman and bold) will also help you tweak your labels for legibility.

Proper symbols for degree, prime, and double prime are also nice to have.

Proper smallcaps (as with optical wight, just scaling the regular caps to the xheight doesn't give good results) is also good as it provides another easily distinguished style.