I read somewhere that Times New Roman was designed to squish the most text into newspaper columns with good appearence, but that it may not be the best font for documents that have a full page format, not columns.
Is there anything to this?
Define “best”.
Ahem
Let me jump in to be the first to correct: it’s typeface not font.
Anyway, this is something I’ve been pondering lately too since this is a topic some get passionate about. To some extent it depends on your document. Recently I’ve become fond of the commonly included Century Schoolbook for the short fiction I write. But that may be frowned upon in a technical document.
Arial seems to gets contempt while the set it’s based on, Helvetica does not. So you may want to avoid Arial in favor of Helvetica which was designed to be easy to read.
You may be murdered for using Comic Sans.
Whatever you think looks good.
In general, serif fonts are considered easier to read, but since sans serif is more common on web pages, I’m not sure if that’s true any more.
I have worked with fonts a lot and found the most practical one is Verdana. The reason I say this is with Verdana there is no confusion between the number zero and the letter O. And also no confusion between a small L and a capital letter i and the number one. This is not true in many fonts.
The devil is in the details and other cliches.
There’s no such thing as a document. There are documents with particular purposes, aimed at particular sets of readers. They may be online or they may be in print. They may be justified or they may be ragged left. The font (typeface and font are used interchangeably in normal conversations and even by experts: see Just My Type by Simon Garfield) may be 9 point or 14 point. The spacing between lines may be narrow or wide. There may be many sections in bold or italics. And on and on.
I use Bookman Old Style 12 point when I’m typing because it is a nice large font that is easily readable. I use Verdana 9 point when I want to fill up a print page with as many words as possible. But that could be the same document at different times.
So there’s no such thing as best, either. Just the momentary best for what you want to accomplish in the next five minutes.
Re the nitpick, a font in modern (computer typesetting) technical usage is a subset of a typeface at a given size in points, a given weight and verticality. For example, typeface Tahoma includes font Tahoma 12pt Demi italic. Common usage almost universally accepts ‘font’ as precisely synonymous with ‘typeface’.
Choice of the “best” font depends a great deal on stylistics (an aesthetic question, by and large) and readability (largely a question of perceptual psychology).
In general, serif fonts are to be preferred in blocks of text (i.e., paragraph of longer length) because tests of perception have indicated they in general are read more quickly and more accurately than sans serif fonts. This advantage fades rapidly, however, as one gets into more ‘decorative’ calligraphic and script fonts, which are ‘prettier’ but harder to read.
There is also the concern, when a web page is intended to be read across multiple platforms with a variety of browsers, as most general purpose websites are, to either (a) choose a font supported by most platforms and browsers (the preferable option), or (b) ensure the .text entry in the CSS file associated with the page includes ‘alias’ fonts that are, as alternatives to the one chosen, e.g., “Font-family=Garamond, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif”
Times New Roman is an excellent default choice, having high readability and a broad penetration across platforms and browsers. This is not necessarily true for other ‘Times’ fonts, notably Windows-standard “Times”. Other fonts that seem to be less ‘condensed’ and hence ‘breathe’ more include Georgia (my personal choice), Garamond, and Cheltenham.
For textual foot- and endnotes and other usages calling for easily readable low-point-size fonts (10 point and smaller) seem to be well rendered in serif fonts from the Bodoni family.
An easily-read font with a ‘delicate’ style suitable for ‘feminine’ and ‘artistic’ text is the Souvenir face (one free font from this group is Souvienne). Century Schoolbook and fonts from the Goudy family have an ‘old school’ look that is desored by many people, while preserving fairly good readability.
Often people prefer shorter textual passages in technical writing to be in a sans serif font for reasons of crispness. Verdana is excellent for this purpose, for, among other reasons, those that Stinky Pete gave. Helvetica is also good for these purposes.
In the last analysis, though, it is a matter of taste. But do take ease of reading into account in making your choices. I’ve seen many people go with Arial either because they like its ‘crispness’ or simply because it is what their word processor or HTML generator defaulted to.
Minion is my favorite for long runs of text in a formal setting. I personally am not too huge on Verdana, but it works great for screen and if I don’t need to read long swaths of text.
You will never go wrong with Courier.
Oof, I disagree. Monospaced fonts are a pain in the ass. Unless you’re actually writing on a typewriter or doing it to effect the look of a typewriter (ETA: Or have a good reason to use a monospaced font, like in writing code or something), I don’t see any good reason to use Courier.
I’ll just say that there is still a lot of argument over this point.
That I would agree with, sadly.
Fair enough.
I want good readability for a long document that will be on paper. It won’t have large blocks of text, but a series of paragraphs with indented bullets.
Then I don’t think you can go wrong with Century Schoolbook, Baskerville, Minion, Caslon, Garamond. They all will work fine.
Can you elaborate on this?
I was actually speaking from my perceived speed of readibility. Proportionally spaced fonts, to me, seem to be much more quick and easy to read than monospaced fonts. I abhor reading typewritten work.
However, it turns out there from a quick Google that there is at least this study, comparing various fonts and readibility:
Now, that does refer to reading legibility of fonts on screen, not print, but it does conform to my experience with monospaced vs proportionally spaced fonts.
ETA: I will say this; for code, yes, I’m a monospace man all the way. But for large swaths of text of natural language? Proportional feels far more readable to me.
Serifs make it easier to tell the difference between i, l, and I (that’s lower-case i-as-in-iceberg, lower-case l-as-in-loop, and upper-case I-as-in-Isaac). Some sans-serif typefaces make it hard to tell the difference between, say, “fail” and “fall.”
I think if the document is going to be read on Windows PCs where font support is unpredictable, you should limit yourself to Arial for titles and isolated lines of text where serifs are not helpful, Times New Roman for blocks of text where serifs help the eye follow the line, Courier New where monospace is important for specific technical reasons, and Symbol for characters unavailable in the above. That way the document content does not get trashed because the reading computer lacks a font.
Knowing the purpose is vital. I’ve known people to engage in guerilla typesetting and provide required documents in ugly “dirty typewriter” typefaces when they didn’t really want the recipient to actually read them.
And the audience, I’ve been known to set the exact same presentation using three different templates (fonts, colors and background pictures) for three different audiences. The actual words were the same, each of the three groups gave me thumbs-up on “great use of color and choice of fonts” (we were being “graded” on the actual presentation as part of a company-wide study), two of them actually said they would have hated some of the other groups’ choices (finance people hate seeing anything in colors other than b/w, engineer types hate that curly lettering the salesladies loved).
Might I suggest Comic Sans?