Fonts
- Introduction
- Theory
- Document Structure
- Chapter Headings
- Chapter Numbering
- Table of Contents
- Outline
- Navigator
- Text Body
- Paragraph styles overview
- Reusing styles
- Default Page Formatting
- Title Page
- Papers without a Title Page
- Pages with and without numbering
- Roman Page Numbering
- Group Work
- Proofreading
- Numbered lists and bullets
- Line numbering
- Cross-references
- Footnotes
- Bibliography
- Quotes
- Tables
- Charts
- Pictures
- Snapshots
- Presentations & Graphics
- Cross tables (Statistics)
- Extra Long Web Adresses
- Fonts
- Emphasis
- Special Characters
- Non separable combinations
- Shortcut keys
- Mouse clicks
- PDFs
- Saving your files
- Several files open at once
- Search and replace
- Spell Check
- Synonyms
- Document Infos
- Labels and Form letters
- Help
- Installing Program
- Microsoft Word
- Practice I
- Practice II
For your Text body you should use a font with serifs. Serifs are the horizontal stroke at the tips of the letters, mostly coinciding with the base line as in the letters “i” or “m”, a few lying above as in “w” and another set placed below the line as for letters “p” and “q”. A few characters such as “o” have no serifs. A typical example of a serif font is Times New Roman. These serifs have the effect of giving the letter some optical stability on the horizontal axis and also reducing the gaps between letters, thus making them to a degree “fuse together” so words become more compact instead of being a collection of individual letters as in the non-serif font Arial. The overall effect is to increase reading speed as you tend to seize complete words as units, your eyes jumping from one word to the next rather than from one letter to the next.
For main titles, posters, flyers etc., whose object it is precisely to attract more attention, fonts without serifs are very suitable.
There exists a great variety of fonts. Futura Lt BT for example is lighter than Arial and marries well with Garamond which in turn is lighter than Times. Philosophically speaking you could say that Garamond has been stripped of any unnecessary fat, being reduced to the “mathematical minimum” necessary for rapid reading. It is also more rounded than Times giving it a less aggressive appearance. And in spite of its slightly reduced size in comparison with the latter it remains very legible.
On the whole avoid using different fonts. Instead just vary font size and typeface (Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic).
If you’re using a page format of A4, you will probably want a font size of 12pt (or 11pt in case you do opt for Arial, which is by nature larger). If producing a pamphlet size A5 you can reduce the font size down to 11pt or even 10.5pt. The better the printer and the quality of paper, the more you can reduce the font size without the text becoming illegible.
