What's best for a book?

[jon404]

Moving rapidly into this new century today, I finally dumped Times Roman (1931) and Arial (ex-Helvetica, 1957) in favor of Adagio ($18 for the font family, from Mighty Deals at http://www.mightydeals.com/deal/adag...torsmediabistr ) ... and yes, it displays very well on the small smartphone screens. Great for web ads and flyers.

But what's going on these days for books? Any recommendations for e-books sold as PDFs... where printing is pushed onto the customer... and where reading onscreen might be primary?

Or, what would you recommend for a printed book? I've used Times New Roman in the past, since... in the past, everyone was so unconsciously familiar with it that the reader never noticed the typeface. But hey, Times goes back to 1931. Is there a generally-agreed-on modern substitute... a serif face... also 'transparent' to the reader?

Thanks for any advice in advance, Jon

[mwenz]

Really, with both sans serif and serif fonts, they can be but variations on a theme. Each category has styles that have lesser to greater design changes, sometimes subtle or more drastic...but line them up and one can be hard pressed to tell them apart.

What pleases you is as or more important for either category. I have my favorites like anyone else but none of those favorites are drastic departures from one another. In some cases, I certainly love some serif designs more for a few of the characters rather than the whole...and for some of those, it will be the italics that might be the reason I like the letter forms more in one than another.

[iamtheblues]

To my eye, Guardian Egyptian Headline Thin is a thing of beauty. The Guardian website is very stylish too, featuring the whole gamut of the font family.
Bob.

[jon404]

Thanks both. Will check out Egyptian Headline Thin.

Mike -- what is your favorite for a printed book? Again, with criteria that the reader would never notice it...

[gwpriester]

Serif fonts are better for books. It is easier to read. I can count on one hand, maybe one finger, the number of books I have read that were set in sans serif.

I used Georgia for a book and it worked fine. I also used Sabon MT Standard along with Sabon SCOsF (old style and small fonts) for the new section lead ins.

The main thing is how clean and readable the text is at a book size, 8-9pt. And increasing the leading (line spacing) helps make the text easier to read.

If you are creating an e-book for Amazon, then they have suggestions for standard fonts that don't require embedding. The book I used Georgia for was published for Kindle and paperback.

[flamerz]

Interesting fonts. I bought Adagio

Sometimes I use this font: http://www.bariol.com/

Its pretty cheap and looks good, they have some icons too.

I'm just a customer, found that font because it was used in a website theme.

[handrawn]

for books stick with serif as Gary says

if you are self-publishing [and I think you are], then if you want some guidance head down to your nearest books store and look at some books.....

[Albacore]

@Iamtheblues states that he finds the Guardian stylish, I agree, it also reads very well as their stylesheets make the headlines standout. When you look at the coding and stylesheets you find the fonts are very predictable using the standard fonts "Guardian Text Sans Web","Helvetica Neue",Helvetica, Arial and "Lucida Grande" and this shows that they work and there really just bog standard fonts.

In last week news on BBC there was a web/book designer who spent £160,ooo pounds of his own money for divers to search the Thames for a missing type faced blocks thrown away just before the end of World War 1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31188255 Who thinks that that this is not crazy when he owned books that used this Dove font and could have quite easily digistised from these reference books. Bonkers just for a font!

[handrawn]

I would argue that a newspaper/website, where there are pictures, is not the same thing as a book; at least a book without the same degree of graphics

The brain sees the whole thing first and then breaks it down into words and sans can be tiring if you read a book at the rate of more than a few pages at a time, when constantly confronted with walls of text

[mwenz]

...Who thinks that that this is not crazy when he owned books that used this Dove font and could have quite easily digistised from these reference books. Bonkers just for a font!

That foundry released the font a couple years ago, it's already been digitized. They have made at least one main modification to it.

It's a bit obsessive to go after the lead, I suppose. But I can understand it. It likely won't be of much use for further modifications to the digitized version they now have, the printed examples would suffice for that. But it is a piece of history and from that perspective, I understand the obsession.

There's a thread in the off topic section about this as well.