Peter Clark writes: I want the body text to be in a serif font, while headings and such in a sans-serif font. The question is not how do I do this, but which ones do I use? Helvetica and Times New Roman are the de facto standard, but I would appreciate other suggestions.
For a book, there are two essential first questions. First, the publisher may have strong ideas about design and fonts, and you would be wise to heed their advice before investing time or money in your own design. The second essential question is audience. A combination like Avant-Guard for the sans-serif and Palatino for the serif font might be fine for some audiences, but seem too `jazzy' for a book intended for an academic audience. Once you get over those two issues, you need to ask yourself about specifics of your own text. Will you have a lot of quotations or expressions in quotation marks? The double-quotation marks in Palatino are ugly. Will you have many illustrations or use line-art? A heavy font like Bookman will not look good with line-art. Do you use a lot of bold, italics, and bold-italics to set off examples or special text? Some fonts, like Times-Roman and Helvetica, are acceptable in each of those faces; other fonts degrade when they're transformed to italics or other faces. If you need any examples or text set in a fixed-width font like Courier, you will want to select main fonts that look presentable on a page with Courier: few do. Finally, the design of the book should heavily influence the choice of fonts. If you have lots of white-space and an open look, you can get away with fonts that would otherwise be ugly. Times-Roman, a compact font intended for newspapers, is often too dense for the pages of a book, and Helvetica is too clunky for most tastes. But the Addison-Wesley books on Postscript use the combination of Times-Roman/Helvetica/Courier effectively because they're set with lots of white-space. The same combination of fonts on a tightly set page would seem too dense. Even within groups of publicly available fonts, you may find that originals like Times-Roman are more attractive than the Times New Roman that Microsoft uses to avoid royalties to Adobe. -- Ronald Florence www.18james.com
