Font of all Wisdom

What's in a font?

This is something people have wars about, and there are publishers guidelines, psycholinguistic research and educational recommendations relating to fonts.

There are many questions about which font is best when, and when can include:

1. Infants learning to read and print
2. Children learning to increase reading/writing speed, maybe cursive
3. Elderly people who are experiencing loss of visual acuity
4. People with various disabilities that impact reading
5. Use on signs and posters
6. Use in project presentations
7. Use in interacting with screens of various sizes

Serif fonts

The serifs in serif fonts are the lines that sharply delineate the ends of characters but extend each side. These are usually related to chisel marks that are placed to bound the character in hand-carving, and also serve to stop rock or stone splintering past that point. Although some have also related them to the flaring that occurs at the end of strokes made with brushes or quills. This paragraph uses the most well known such font, Times New Roman, which was designed for newspaper use to a. be compact and b. give a uniform appearance to the paragraph - used in 16pt in my enlarged print editions. LlIi1!

The italic version is not just a slanted version in a good font, but is a compatible font in its own right that is designed to work side by side with the roman font, but is usually based on italic handscript. LlIi1!

Other fonts are designed to be more elegant and tend to have thinner lines, looser kerning and perhaps taller ascenders and descenders. This is Baskerville. LlIi1! This is Baskerville Italic: LlIi1!

Some modern fonts are specifically designed to be good on screen and tend to be thicker as fonts whose strokes get thinner than a pixel are problematic. This is Georgia - specified as the default for my e-books. Note that the numbers are aligned at the top with x rather than with capital letters or ascenders: LlIi1! This is Georgia Italic: LlIi1!

Those that are best for paperback books tend to be something a little more elegant and less dense that Times with moderate thick-thin variation, avoiding the extremes of thinness or thickness. This is Iowan Old Style - used in 11 or 12pt in standard print paperbacks. This is Iowan Old Style Italic: LlIi1!

Note that in the italic versions, instead of the hard serifs top and bottom, we have gentle inflow and outflow ticks.

This is also a characteristic of good handprint or comic type fonts and fonts designed specifically to help children learning to read and write. The upticks help to provide a natural spacing between characters as well as distinguishing reflecting characters like b and d or p and q. In Rosemary Sassoon's study of children learning to read, Times Italic was the most effective existing font - and she designed her own based on what she learned.  Sassoon Infants is upright and recommended for children starting to learn to read and illustrates good printing style.  Sassoon Primary has a slant as well as the upticks that help transition to cursive. This is Sassoon Primary on my computer - you probably don't have it on yours so will see a substitute, with luck Times Italic: LlIi1!

Sans Serif Fonts

 

Sans serif font do not have lines at the end of the characters, and some styles may use upticks, making them closer to the original handprint forms. This text is in Comic Sans which, like Chalkboard, does not have slant, upticks or serifs (except on I or 1 or distinguish them from 'l' ('lower case L'): LlIi1!

A good general purpose sans serif font that was commissioned by Microsoft for computer use is Trebuchet, and was used for window titles in Windows XP. As a computer font it importantly distinguishes the confusable characters by use of upticks, with a straight entry into the one ('1') and a curled exit from the( 'l'): LlIi1!

Verdana is another Microsoft-comissioned screen font of the same vintage but is squarer. This means that horizontal and vertical resolution needed for accurate and easy reading (on screen or in terms of human vision) are comparable, but it also meant "it never felt comforable as an eBook font" according to Microsoft's font manager Bill Hill, and as a screen-optimized font was not intended for printing and massively increases the number of pages needed in print. It moreover reverts to use of serifs for disambiguation: LlIi1!

APH (American Publishing House for the Blind) primarily addresses those diagnosed with low vision or some degree of blindness, have their own APHont they recommend, as illustrated here - you will possibly have to install it to see it. It is a squarish open font without systematic ticks and is similar to Verdana which can be used instead, although close inspection will reveal some tick-like differences (note 'QRqr'). LlIi1!

The now classical (then 'neo-grotesque') Helvetica was designed for clarity across a wide range of signage usages, with Geneva (used here) being a squarer more open Apple variant commissioned for the Mac, and Arial being the well known variant shipped with all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 3, as well as with their office software.  It doesn't do well on ambiguity: LlIi1!

Calibri is a similar but small-bodied sans serif font that was part of a font collection commissioned by Microsoft and introduced with Windows Vista to show off their ClearType subpixel technology - colour monitors have red, green and blue subpixels and treating them as RGB units throws away the true resolution that you get by treating the subpixels individually. Thus smaller finer fonts can be use on the same screens (although it assumes a white/grey background and doesn't work so well on colour backgrounds). Because the 300dpi laser printers of the time had three times the resolution of the 100dpi screens, this bridged the gap and allowed a font that looked appropriate for print to be readable on screen. LlIi1!

When to use which?

0. For standard print for adult readers, I like a relaxed but elegant font without the high density of Times New Roman and smaller font sizes. I like Iowan Old Style for pages of text: Iowan OS– LlIi1!

1&2: Sassoon Infants and Primary were designed for those age groups and testing showed they were better than the other fonts available at the time in terms of promoting effective reading and illustrating good writing.  Comic Sans and Times New Roman Italic could also be considered, but Verdana and Trebuchet might be more appropriate alternatives. Sassoon Primary – LlIi1!

3&4: APH offers APHont and recommends Verdana or other sans serif fonts as an alternative. It suggests calling 14 to 16pt 'enlarged print' and 18 to 26pt 'large print' (which should also be printed ragged right rather than justified according to their guidelines, with titles in Title Case rather than ALL CAPS). APH note that if people need bigger than that they should consider Braille. However, given the research on readability and the role of italic like ticks in easing reading of separate characters while maintaining the integrity of words, the fonts recommended for children could also be considered.  For enlarged print, it is I think better to stick to the familiar serif styles, and Times Roman works well without making things expensive in terms of high page counts. For large print, I find that APH and Verdana slap me in the face and I hate reading them, whether in an ebook or on paper. Trebuchet again is a good compromise – LlIi1!

5&6: There are many display fonts designed for signs, and many different aims of such fonts. But for posters readability remains key, although headings may usefully use different fonts - usually selected from the same font family or collection so they work together well. Lucida is one of the best developed such families, with serif and sans serif, fixed and proportional spaced fonts in a variety of weights, as well blackletter, calligraphy and handwriting fonts, although sticking with a squarer sans serif gothic style helps readability at a distance. Arial Narrow is a well known variant of Arial useful for tables and spreadsheet imports, and Arial Nova gives an intermediate condensed form as well as a light weight. Verdana has similarly been enhanced with a Pro family that includes Light and Black weights and Condensed variants that are good where space is at a premium – use bold headings to bring people close and then change to a lighter font, condensed when needed: Verdana LlIi1!

7: Trebuchet is the clear winner on screen, particularly for spreadsheets and code where a degree of compactness is needed and ambiguity can't be afforded (unless you need not just numbers but all characters to line up vertically when the Lucida family offers fixed pitch serif and sans serif fonts. Most sans serif fonts confuse 'l' and 'I' while many serif fonts confuse 'l' and '1' (manual typewriters didn't even have a 1 key, or ! –you used the L'. keys). Note that for web (html) text you should not try to control font, size or layout as it needs to flow over many screen formats and these should remain under user control. Of course this page (like many blogs and commercial sites) breaks both the rules of the WWW as well as the family rules of print composition. But here it's so that I can illustrate the fonts discussed - but that stops now! Trebuchet LlIi1.

My Casindra Lost stories are available in my recommended formats

Kindle ebook (mobi) edition ASIN: B07ZB3VCW9 — tiny.cc/AmazonCL

Kindle paperback edition ISBN-13: 9781696380911 justified Iowan OS 11

Kindle enlarged print edn ISBN-13: 9781708810108 justified Times NR 16

Kindle large print edition ISBN-13: 9781708299453 ragged Trebuchet 18

If there is demand, I'm happy to make larger print versions of the others available too!