Problem
I’m working in FM 8, Win 7 x64 on a book that will be published this Fall. I’ve now been asked to do the book design, in addition to most of the writing and basic template design. The subject matter is primarily financial . it’s a book about the history of taxation. It’s not a scholarly work at all, but rather one designed to “wake up” American teens and young adults to some of the issues involved. Footnotes are used here and there, but more for explanation of background/details than in a traditional sense as references. The book will be published in a standard 6×9 format, paperback.
All that having been said . What are people’s favorite or recommended fonts for such a project. And since this is being published on a shoestring budget with a nonprofit/educational bent, suggestions of free fonts would be most welcome.
Solution
Besides being a matter of taste (which really cannot be argued), font choice cannot be done intelligently without knowing *lot* of other information, such as:
- medium of the deliverable (printed, PDF, HTML, eBook, etc.)
- page size (if fixed, or range of page size if variable)
- column width and point size (which together determine the point size range)
- leading
- nature of content (fiction, general non-fiction, scholarly writing, technical documentation, etc.)
- natural organization of content (all text in long paragraphs vs. text blocks broken up by shorter paragraphs and/or lists vs. text with lots of tables and figures, etc.)
What works well for the kind of technical content I work with most of the time (long, complex sentences but often fairly short paragraphs, and lots of tables and bulleted lists) is very different from what I would use for some of the general non-fiction I edit on the side. And neither of those correspond to what I prefer to see when I read fiction.
If you asked this question over on the Techwr-l list, I’m sure you’d get a flood of highly opinionated answers. If you asked it on the copyeditors list, I think you’d get a handful of “it depends” answers similar to mine since there are some actual book designers on that list. But over here in the world of FrameMaker, I’m not sure that we have a lot of people who fancy themselves font fondlers.
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