On Feb 26, 2007, at 5:50 AM, Brennon Bortz wrote:
Recently, someone mentioned resorting to using Times as a lyric font. I'd like to ask what other fonts people typically use for lyrics, text boxes, text expressions, etc. Is there something close to "standard." If it would be better to reply off-list, please feel free to do so.
Times is probably fairly close to a standard. Certainly nothing else is more standard. Since I'm among those who have disparaged Times New Roman, perhaps it would help if I elaborate a bit.
I suppose I have to start with the difference between a typeface and a font. A typeface is a design style; it indicates the shape of all the characters, regardless of how they are drawn. A font is a specific rendering of that typeface into a tool that you can use for printing. In the old days the typeface was designed by an artist who drew out the characters, and the font was pressed into lead. Each printer would have his own font, though later they came to be mass- produced and thus essentially identical. Nowadays the font is a digital rendering. There can be many fonts for the same typeface, and indeed for all the most common typefaces there are.
My objections to Times New Roman is an objection to the font, not the typeface. It's simply not very well designed. This is most noticeable in the measure of spacing between letters. Any time you have "rt" for example, they will run together, which is bad for both aesthetics and readability. In many applications you'd have the option of kerning them apart, but you can't do that in Finale (not in lyrics anyway). Times New Roman is popular because it is ubiquitous and free. There are many Times fonts that are better implemented than TNR, but you have to pay for them. Most people don't bother. They've got TNR for free, and so does everyone else who might open the document: why bother spending money just to become incompatible? It's like the QWERTY keyboard.
My objection to the Times typeface as a lyric font is milder. I don't dislike Times generally. I think it's not the best choice for lyrics mostly because it doesn't have a large x height. For lyrics you want to have as much readability as you can get for the space you take up, and horizontal space is more crucial than vertical space. Therefore, two features which will help you is large x-height (the ratio of lowercase height to uppercase height) and narrower characters (ie, lower ratio of width to height). In both cases you don't necessarily want to go too extreme, but I think you want to be on the good side of average.
Times's x-height is not excessively small, but it's not particularly large either. I actually use Times most of the time in spite of this flaw (mostly because clients are comfortable with it), just as I sometimes use Palatino in spite of it not being particularly narrow. For my own casual stuff, I experiment more. Lately I've been using Minion, a relatively new Adobe font, very well-designed with readability primary in mind. It also has a nice condensed version which is narrower than normal but not so narrow as to look unduly skinny. A possible drawback is that Minion has a modern and slightly cold look to it, which might be an aesthetic drawback for some styles of music.
Newer typefaces tend to have larger x-height than the classics. (The proprietary typeface designed for the Economist magazine has an especially large one, for example.) Older fonts tend to have smaller x-heights (eg, most of the many varieties of Garamond). I think it would be worth exploring the classics to look for one whose x-height isn't too small. Adobe's standard package includes a Caslon face that I think fits that description. I think that would probably be an excellent lyric choice, though I've never tried it. (But come to think of it, perhaps I will....)
I don't even consider sans-serif fonts for lyrics. To my eye it's just ugly and unprofessional looking. On average, sans-serifs are less readable than serifs, but that's not a 100% rule. There are some very readable sans-serif faces, and anyway readability is dependent on context, not an absolute quality.
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