Comment by oddthink
4 days ago
I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.
But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.
Technical pens (staedtler) are great for math writing and quite precise (I studied engineering and used these a lot for notes with lots of formulas, diagrams, math notation etc), but the ink does take a bit to dry so it can be smeary particularly for left-handed use. They’re also a bit unforgiving with writing angles (likely not optimized for writing, for sure but they do work)