There’s no bigger decision you make in designing a book than picking the body typeface. A book by its nature is a long reading experience, and as book publishers we want our books to be as easy to read as possible while communicating the author’s intent. Style and fashion also play their part in many book designs, particularly in popular niches. The accumulated expectations of 500 years of book readers also come into play. Books are pretty conventional objects, after all.
Some fonts really lend themselves to book design while others, which look good in a brochure or on a business card or billboard, make odd, unreadable books. Any idiosyncrasy in the type design will be magnified by the repetition of typesetting 75,000 or 100,000 words in thousands of lines on hundreds of pages.
So the choice of your basic typeface looms large when you sit down to design your book. Here are five typefaces that have become favorites and which will almost always look great in your books too. You’ll find links to the vendor of the fonts as well.
- Garamond – Named after the famed 16th-century French “punch-cutter” or type designer Claude Garamond, many versions of this old style face exist. The one used most frequently now is the version designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe. It’s known for its graceful, flowing style and humanistic elegance. Here’s a sample:
- Janson – Designed by the Hungarian Nicholas Kis in the 17th century, the design was mistakenly attributed to the Dutch printer Anton Janson. It is a strong and elegant face with marked contrast between thin and thick strokes, and may be the most popular text face for fine bookmaking. Here’s a sample:
- Bembo – Bembo, another old style typeface, was based upon a design by Fracesco Griffo, who worked for famed early printer and publisher Aldus Manutius in Venice in the 15th and early 16th century. It was a clear attempt to bring the humanist script of the finest scribes of the day to the printed page, and served as the chief inspiriation to Claude Garamond, among others. Bembo has a classic beauty and readability that are unmatched.
- Caslon – One of the most popular text typefaces of the 18th and 19th centuries, Caslon was designed by William Caslon in England in the early 18th century. An old-style face modeled on early Dutch originals, Caslon has an appealing irregularity and creates a distinctive texture on the page. Many people recognize Caslon from its extensive use in textbooks. Here’s a sample:
- Electra – A 1935 design by the prolific type designer D.W. Dwiggins, Electra creates a distinctive “color” and evenness on a printed page. It’s inventor said he wanted Electra to excel at setting down warm human ideas, to endow it with a warmth of blood and personality. Here’s a sample:
Get Electra here
Although it would be easy to fill a book with samples of great text typefaces, it’s also true that many professional book designers could, if necessary, limit themselves to just these five fonts and continue to create great—and greatly varied—book designs, for years to come.
So when it comes time to select the typeface for your next book, choose one of these five and rest assured that you have made a great selection.
Those are my favorites. What about yours?
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Garamond! Love Garamond. So much so that I’m using it as the font for the new blog.
Yes, Garamond definitely has an elegance that’s hard to beat. Will check out your new design.
My list of five would be Sabon, Scala, a new one I’m dying to use: Calluna, Minion, and Stone Serif. Runner-up: Chapparal.
@Stephen, interesting list. I used Sabon frequently years ago, don’t know Scala, and have done several books in Minion although I seem to have gone off it in recent years. I would have bet that most designers would have one of these 5 on their “favorites” list and, once again, I would have been wrong. Thanks for your input.
Hey Joel! Thanks for directing me to this post! I have just started to realize that book designers have rabid “font” likes and dislikes– I actually saw a guy wearing a shirt that said “Helvetica”—that’s dedication! I re-tweeted!
Thanks for stopping by, Christy. Oh yeah, don’t get us designers talking fonts, it just goes on and on… LoL Thanks for the tweet.
Interesting–to me–that I clearly favor Old Style (Garalde) types for text. ANd I still like Futura and Avant Garde a lot for display, tho’ I’ve used that old saw, Gill Sans, some recently.
@Stephen, interesting. I was using Frutiger for several years for heads, lots of marvelous variations in the family, but just this year I’ve started going back to Futura. I wore out on Avant Garde around the same time I OD’d on Souvenir. But Gill, yeah, I could use that. The last two books I’ve done were in Janson, both chosen by clients. It was used in one of Obama’s books, and my client asked me to sample it for him.
Thanks for stopping by!
Kepler, hands down.
Hmmm … Just looked at Kepler on Linotype’s site. I don’t like the thick strokes in the roman fonts. Somehow they look as if they don’t balance with the thi strokes. Anyone else notice this?
@Karlene, thanks for that. Kepler’s a new one to me. @Stephen, I saw the variation as an interesting color variation. Although the samples look interesting, it’s hard to tell what it would look like set in a block of text. But I’m glad to know about Kepler and will keep an eye out for a use. Karlene, do you use it in book work, or as display?
Warnock Pro: it have all cuttings pro typographer might want to use, from display to captions and subheads. Also lights, semibolds and so on. I like this kind of pro fonts, they bring together all the languages and glyphs possible and also all typographic finesses we can found on metal cutted fonts from printing golden era. So far away from scanned and scaled Times (witch is not bad font either).
I liked very much you top 5: many good ideas, thank you. If only they include all needed glyphs for me — in that account many font sites are misaligned and incorrect (Im estonian and working also with swedish and latvian periodicals).
And remember, its not about what font you use, its always how you use it.
I’m attracted to Warnock Pro for some of the same reasons Andres mentions above. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t properly say it’s a favorite, tho’ I am about to begin a book interior with it, if UPS delivers a package from my client tonight.
@Andres, thanks for your comment! Warnock pro has tremendous character and flexibility, another winner from Robert Slimbach. But I’ve never thought of using it in books. Do you do book typography? To me it’s much more suitable to advertising or collateral materials, more stylized than the typical book fonts like these 5, from my perspective.
@Stephen, what made you choose Warnock Pro, is it something to do with the book you’re working on (assuming the package arrived)?
Well, Joel, I had to do the cover of this book months ago, so that it would be ready for the client’s new catalog. And for that I quickly decided to use a type with an eastern flair, Tiger Rag, for the main title. For the subtitle, then, I wanted a strong serif font, but not so overpoweringly strong as to overpower my eastern font.
I’ve liked the solid x-height of Warnock Pro for some time now, and the proportion of x-height to the overall size of the characters (that is, x-height plus ascender) really seems to work with the same in the Tiger Rag main title.
Once I’d decided on the Warnock Pro family for the cover (subtitle and author’s name)–and it won a super-quick approval for the cover from my client, a university press–it was easy for me to decide to use it for the book’s interior pages.
P.S. And, no, the UPS did not deliver package on Wednesday (which should have meant Tuesday delivery), although the client paid for two-day service. It’s not as if the package was stuck somewhere prior to the New York part of the journey. It reached Farmingville–20-25 minutes away from me on Tuesday.
I can’t imagine what the alleged emergency was, as I was able to use the roads to get to my day job both Monday and Tuesday. neeless to say, losing two production days guarantes I’ll be workng Christmas Day. And I am m ost annoyed. Still. That’s assuming they finally deliver today.
Hey Steve, I’m really curious now about Warnock Pro. Is your project a book with large type or a lot of leading? I can see it easily on the subtitle and author name, still can’t imagine lots of it on a page. Not to add to your workload but I wonder whether, once you’ve started laying out the book, if you could show me a page.
Hope you get your delivery, don’t want to think of you working on Christmas if you don’t want to!
Will do, Joel. It’s a WWII biography-history sort of thing. Pacific campaign vs. the Japanese. My sample pages are at 11/15. Kind of airy. I’ll let you have a look when I have some real copy down. The package arrived, but I haven’t gotten toi t yet. I’m sworn off working tonight.
Comic Sans is a personal favourite of mine…
Hi Joel,
I am a newcomer to the domain of book design and typography. To an outsider without any formal training in design, all the business of font selection and laying out of text looks like some black magic. But I really liked your article and the discussion going on in comments after that since it gives some ideas about what to look at when going through this.
Can you suggest some readings for somebody who is not intending to train as a designer but wants to appreciate the art of typesetting? I have laid my hands on “The Elements of Typographic Style” but feel like I am not ready for it yet.
Thanks for the nice blog
Abhaya
Well, I was moved to have a say of my own regarding the choosing of type for designing books on my own blog at http://tianobookdesign.com/blog/?p=120
Looking over your font choices again, Joel, I am surprised that I am just thinking to say now that I notice four of your five are in the Old Style (Garalde) classification. As I’ve noted before, that’s where I lean. Thing is, the fifth, Electra, a type in the Modern classification looks pretty nice. Then I catch the high contrast between thick and thin strokes and I’m reminded why I don’t care for Transitional or Modern typefaces.
Abhaya, welcome to the fraternity of typographers. DId Joel teach you the secret handshake yet?
Abhaya, thanks for your comment. Book design was a real specialty for a long time, so most of the books written on it were for other book designers and typographers. You might look at The Non Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams for an introduction, then explore more from there.
Stephen, I’m glad you noticed. Yes, I really prefer oldstyle faces for book work, and I like to pair them with contrasty sans or semi-serif faces for display. Not always, but it’s my tendency. I talked about this in my more recent post on 3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book.
Electra, used properly, is a face of amazing sophistication. I’ve used it principally for novels or “literary” work. It’s sweet, you should try it!
Ah, the secret handshake. It’s not just pi in the sky.
I got asked a question I’d never even given any thought to the other day, someone asked if printed book interiors always have to be set in serif fonts? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book with sans-serif interior text, but is it a hard and fast rule? I certainly find sans-serif easier to read on screens, so I can see it as a choice for e-readers, but paper & ink may be a different matter.
Victor, I’ve heard that studies show that reading long stretches of sans serif type in print tires the eyes. The serifs actually serve to lead the reader thru a line of type. That said, I’ve lately (over the past few years) noticed a number of printed books using sans serif for main body text. Interestingly, most of the books were books related to the subject of design. All in all, I continue to use serif types for book interiors, although I still think I’d like to try what I call a “near serif,” Optima, for the right interior.
I’d be curious, have you thought of using a sans for interior pages?
Not personally, I was proof reading a short story and it took me a couple of paragraphs to notice he’d used Lucida Sans Unicode instead of a fixed width font for the print out. It actually looks quite good, but I can see how serifs would guide the eye along the line better, sort of a tunnel effect. He’s not a fan of serif fonts, he thinks they all look too similar. I guess he could get Lulu to knock a copy out once he’s done and see how it stands up to reading.
It’s tough enough selling books; more so, for self-published books. I see no reason to potentially antagonize readers with typefaces that are trying on the eyes. (There’s a book by an author Wheidon, I think, that does some research on sans vs. serifs.) I think a designer who puts his or her own sense of making an “interesting-looking” book, above what serves readers is not really doing the job the client hired for.
Hey Victor, good question. Like Stephen, I’ve seen a number of books done in sans serif fonts, but they are mostly art books. Typically there is not a great deal of running text. When set in isolated blocks there’s nothing wrong with sans serif, it’s just when you get to long documents that they are problematic to my eye anyway. After all, there are many many examples of annual reports, brochures, and other types of printed material that use sans serif fonts with no trouble.
There are a lot of fonts that have come out over the last couple of years that are “transitional” in the sense that they are modeled on oldstyle fonts and have the canted axis and varying stress in the stroke weights, but only “swell” at the terminals instead of using serifs. I don’t consider Optima a good candidate for this kind of work because I’ve seen it used for long text and I find it unappealing, but some of these new fonts might be pretty interesting to try. Thanks to both of you for the interesting conversation.
@Joel, good points. It can be used for interior, but needs lot more expertise to make it look good and also to be readable. I have seen a lot of epic failures, but also some good uses in regular novels. But those good uses are always linked somehow to book theme and content. Fantasy novel can more easily be set in sans serif, but not history book or classic novel.
Personally using ITC Officina sans for one series of poetry and short stories books. But for lenghty texts it seems less usable, overall color of page tends to became too dark. Readability is quite good, and not so confusing to reader as say Helvetica.
Andres, thanks for your comment. I use ITC Officina in both the sans and the serif versions, very utilitarian fonts, they look particularly good in small sizes, although I just had to pull Officina Sans from a job I was doing because my client really hated the ampersand. Oh well. Thanks for stopping by.
Anyone tried Adobe’s Arno or Garamond Premier? Two more gems from Robert Slimbach and cousins of those on your list, Joel. I was quite pleased with the results I got with Arno.
I just found Arno a few months ago, what a terrific typeface. I used it on a photography book that’s on press now, but I’m still getting used to it. Typographers have an odd and oddly intimate relationship with typefaces and I find it takes a while to get comfortable with a new font, get to know it’s quirks. Not familiar with Garamond Premier, although I’ve done many books in Adobe Garamond and Garamond Pro. It’s one of the most readable and malleable faces I use, and it’s pretty space efficient as well. Thanks Kevin!
I’d used Garamond for years–it was the first the first serif font I purchased and added to my Mac’s resident fonts back in 1989–Futura was the first sans, purchased at the same time. I used the hell out of it on all sorts of things–this was before I was designing books. I received Garamond Premier Pro as a gift from Adobe for, I think, buying CS2 a few years baack. I used that a little too often, too. So, yes, I’ve been crazy about Adobe Garamond Premier Pro.
As for Arno Pro, I used it on a straight layout project–it had been picked by the client (a chem book I believe it was). But I just go thru the first pass of a 1,000+-page novel I also did the design on. It has a perfect structure for being readable and usable in a lot of different ways on this novel’s many different elements (along with Scala Pro Sans). Plus Arno’s slightly compact and kept the novel from burgeoning way over the 1,000 pages.
Altogether two of my favorites right now, even tho’ I’m determined to lay off the Garamond for a while yet, I’ve been there and done that a number of times alredy over the years.
Stephen, as I recall you are a real Garamond fan, and why not? Have you ever tried Granjon or Sabon? Granjon is the Linotype version of Garamond, but it sets a bit differently.
No to Granjon. Yet. But Sabon was on my original list up above somewhere. I’ve used it on a coupla books. I went thru a period where, like with Garamond (whether ITC at first, then Adobe Pro, and finally Adobe Premier Pro), it would be the first thing I’d think of for each new project until I pulled myself away from it.
Like with Arno Pro, Robert Slimbach created optical weights for Garamond Premier Pro. The letterforms start out fairly heavy and loosely kerned at the caption sizes and gradually become lighter and more tightly kerned up through text sizes, subhead sizes and display sizes, creating a sense of optical balance and evenness from one size to another. In an age of digital type design it seems reasonable to go to that much trouble to get your type right. That the master punch cutters like Garamond and Granjon perceived the need for optical sizes then cut them in metal just boggles the mind!
As he was finishing up Adobe Garamond in 1989 the literature describes Slimbach envisioning a whole new reinterpretation of Garamond that years later would become Garamond Premier. It would be interesting to know if that reinterpretation went beyond parsing the typeface into optical variations.
Thanks for this! I find many people don’t pay any attention to fonts at all, which is why the use of the hated times new roman and much loathed ariel are so widespread – no one bothers to change the defaults.
You have introduced me to 4 new fonts here, which I shall go seeking. I stumbled upon garamond by reading the frontspiece in an old novel. UK publishers used to always list the font.
For my novel, I used 3 typefaces, each for a different reason. It made formatting hell, but well worth the result.
1 – for general text, I used Bookman Old Style for its friendliness and easiness on the eyes.
2 – for news items, I used Courier New, which is used by broadcast wire services.
3 – for start of chapter quotes, I used Ariel because I needed a font which would read well in small size over short bursts.
Since then, I default into either Garamond or Palintino Linotype, but I look forward to checking out the others!
All the best,
Jeff Rose-Martland
author of Game Misconduct
Thanks, Jeff, always nice to find something new. Your choices make sense (although I probably wouldn’t use Arial) and there’s a whole world of fonts to discover. Thanks for your input!
Jeff,
When I was a kid and I would dress myself, it wasn’t unusual for me to wear my favorite red socks, and mismatched pants and shirt. And my mom had an expression–I don’t mean to insult anyone, but it’s just a descriptive line–she’d say, “You look like gypsies dressed you.”
Too many typeface families is typesetting that might draw that kind of a line. And I know about working on books with many diverse design elements. I just finished design and layout of a 1,000+-page novel. It had all sorts of element in it aside from straight body text: quotations, letters, newspaper articles, magazine articles, signs, and more. The idea as I saw it was to distinguish each element from all the others (obviously), but have it remain part of the “culture” of the book.
Palatino is a default font on the Macintosh, as Arial (I believe) is on Windows machines. This has led to an overuse of these typefaces. Palatino was one of my original two or three favorite typefaces. But I had to learn to use other typeface. In fact, Garamond replaced Palatino as my favorite text face early on, when it got thru to me that if everyone had it, it was bound to be overused. But all the varieties of Garamond–and Garamond may be a misnomer; you have to check whether the Garamond you use is truly a Garamond-style type (if you care to know, that is–interesting history).
Anyway, just a few thoughts that came to mind.
I greatly appreciate your advice Stephen. I was actually just discussing this article with my wife and saying the very thing: that I am often concerned when sending out work that the recipient may not have the font I used. Having no knowledge of fonting (other than endlessly scrolling down the list in various wordprocessers over the years), articles like this are very useful!
And I know what you mean about multiple typefaces. I try to avoid them now, especially since I have discovered what a pain they are when reformatting the text. Still, I have used multiples for artistic purposes, primarily when I needed to separate the sections. The narrative in Game Misconduct is tied together with media reports, which separate the location change between 5 different cities. It looks really good on paper.
My finalist entry for the CBC Lit Awards (set in a call centre) used multiple fonts to indicate which conversation was taking place; the piece was all dialogue. As a literary device it worked extremely well and looks wonderful off the printer. However, using 4 different fonts caused massive headaches for both me and the magazine publisher who finally bought it. Which is the best warning of all: the use of multiple fonts, no matter how well done, may render your work unpublishable!
For a look at Game Misconduct, check out google books:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=ML5LqDk0wIoC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Jeff, for an “amateur” production (in the best sense of the word) your book looks good.
Curiously, I’ve found that many DIY self-publishers resort to this device of using several typefaces. Usually I find it unnecessary, and if the book is well-written, more of an obstacle to readers than just setting the book in one typeface. Authors always claim that they do this to make their intention clear to the reader, but I think you have to give the reader more credit. They usually know what’s going on. Sometimes a simple text break or a small ornament can be used to differentiate different sections of the book and it really isn’t necessary to have the pages jumping from one font to another. But it takes a while to learn all this stuff! Thanks for letting us see your work.
Thanks for the compliment Joel!
I see what you mean about the fonts, now. There really isn’t an easy guide to fonting for writers (unless there’s one here!). My wife had to explain the difference between serif and san-serif to me, and I bet she only knows because she’s a visual artist! With the rapid expansion of ebooks and self-publishing, this knowledge is certainly more essential. I too have found that the ‘artistic reasons’ for fonting often are the result of weak writing or immaturity; like drawing hearts of the ‘i’ in your name. The other reason is probably a simple lack of knowedge of layout. I’ve gone up the steep learning curve, but I bet many take one look at the hill and park. I don’t often see ornament breaks in modern work, but frequently do in early pulp and sci-fi. I bet a lot of writers never even think of it.
Again, thanks for the compliment. It means a lot!
Jeff, my compliments, too: gorgeous work for first try. You might be interested in Robert Bringhursts “The Elements of Typographic Style” — author is poet and writer itself. Its pretty hard at first moment, but you cant live without it after reading it once. I met him once in our country ant going to see him at ATYPI conference in Dublin soon — his insight is beautiful and well argumented, too.
That sounds like quite a project, Stephen. I usually think of novels as the simplest, typographically, but yours is anything but. I’m doing a book right now that the author wanted in 3 or 4 typefaces, but by using other ways to distinguish the various sections, I’ve managed to keep in one body face with only small sections in a second typeface.
Well, it was a big project. Or I should say it is a big project, as it’s not quite complete. Next week I should receive some of the author-publisher’s cover ideas that he put together in Microsoft Publisher. (He’ll make PDFs to send me.)
My client, at first, was thinking about multiple typefaces. I told him my “dressed by gypsies” story and he got the point immediately. So I was able to go my usual route: a serif for body type and most longish elements; sans serif for display items and specialized, short text passages. For this novel I chose Arno Pro as my serif and Scala Sans for (duh) the sans. It’s sometimes fun to use a superfamily that has been designed with both a serif and a sans serif for a real unified look, tho’ I generally think this can sometimes seem too programmed. An exception, for me, was a student guide I just finished, in which I chose to use Jos Buivenga’s Fontin and Fnntin Sans families.
Stephen, I think it’s really attractive (for the right book, of course) to use a family of serif & sans, for instance in academic books. I love Arno but haven’t used Scala Sans much at all. Fontin Sans I just discovered last year, and have used it several times on cover designs and as display type, chapter headers and the like. It’s a beautiful face. Right now I’m still exploring Chapparal, which I re-discovered after writing the Carol Twombly piece, and have a book going to press set in it, can’t wait to see the finished product.
I should go thru my archives–tho’ it’s such a long, tedious process, digging out CDs and DVDs, decompressing files, and checking what typefaces I used–because I believe I used Chapparal for a book a year or two back (after reading something somewhere else about Carol Twombly).
Looking thru all these new (to me) designers commening here, I’m wondering if I should run another edition of my 4 Questions for Designers on my blog. I’ve learned so much more about type and typography since then that I would love to see some new takes on the subject. I wonder, too, whether anyone who answered previously has anything changed to say.
I don’t know if I remember that, Stephen, it sounds interesting. How does it work?
It is bit confusing how the word “display” is used: for me, it describes special font cutting for bigger sizes, not for using some font for headings.
Look Arno Pro and Warnock Pro — both have special cuttings (display) for bigger sizes. Display means much more refined character rendering, just take and try with those two fonts. Naming say Arial “display” have no sense, since it does not have any different cutting for this.
Joels Fontin makes more sence in this context, seems very good indeed for “sans” companion and headings (and has good italic, too). And again cause of refined rendering…
Andres, you are correct insofar as talking about typefaces. A specifically designed Display font is just so. But there is another way to use the word “display,” as the context reveals, and that is in referring to the material that is typeset. Display material includes heads, of course, but also othe non-bosy text items, such as tables, signage, and such.
Thanks, Stephen: I supposed there is another meaning.
Thanks for the clarification, Stephen, that’s exactly how I was using the term. I do love those fonts that come with “display” variants, too!
I just discovered that, of the fonts listed, only Garamond is in the Windows pack. Not an issue for self-publishing, but a heads up for submissions: if you use a font not in the default pack, you run the risk of the recipient not having the font on their system, meaning your formating may be off when they substitute one of the defaults.
It would be wonderful if you would do your articles in a way that they are easy to print out and save. or share. Like have them in a PDF.
That’s a great idea, Jason, thanks. Especially the posts with samples of typography would be nice in PDF.
There’s actually a WordPress add-on that attaches a button to each new blog entry that creates a PDF of the entry on the blog reader’s computer. But you need to be careful and investigate, because it’s one of the things my tech guy told me to ditch after I was hacked into. I still think it was done thru carelessness going online on my then-new laptop via unprotected WiFi, tho’. And it did work flawlessly as far as distilling PDFs.
Hey, that sounds interesting Stephen. Do you by any chance remember what the plugin was called?
Also, Jason, if you just want the text without the images (not a good solution, I know) you can use the “send to print friendly” button in the “sharing is sexy” buttons at the bottom of the post, and it will print or create a PDF of the article.
Sorry, Joel. I’m trying to remember, but I just can’t seem to. I just did a quick Bing search–I’m thru with Google and Chrome until they stop making a goof out of their “Do no evil” motto by pushing for corrupting the equal access thing of the Internet, and I recommend everyone else boycott all things Google–for the plugin. To no avail.
Well, thanks Stephen, I bet I could find it.
Not sure how your boycott is going. They were still ranked #1 on Alexa as of today. I guess I should find out what the little gnomes have been up to.
I don’t want to redirect the purpose of your blog and the comments generated by this piece in particular, but Google’s come out against net neutrality essentially. They’re for a two-tier system, with big business and corporations having all the broadband and speed and the rest of us having a slow pathway to the ‘net.
Hey guys!
Sorry for blowing my own trumpet but perhaps this can be useful: http://blog2book.pothi.com
You only need to specify the URL of the blog and how many posts you want etc. You can choose which posts you want and it will create an e-book for free. I will love to get your feedback on the service!
Regards,
Abhaya
Methinks you’re missing the point of this discussion: the question is about a simple plug-in to WordPress that will allow one to turn a particular piece on a blog into a PDF.
As an aside, using a Gothic flavored typeface for your headline and that funky font for your body text would not give the casual observer a great deal of confidence in your typographic skills. (I don’t mean to be an ass or unkind; I’m just trying to explain that if you’re going to “blow your own trumpet,” you need to make sure your presentation is up to snuff, else you may unintentionally turn away prospects before they’ve had a chance to see your wares.)
Hi Stephen,
I think the original problem was to have a easy way to share the articles. One good way is if Joel creates PDFs for a selected category or of selected posts and provides them for download. Not like a WordPress plugin but might prove to be useful to new readers who get a collection of the best articles posted till date!
That aside, let me accept right away that I am quite bad with these things. I don’t have much typographic skills to talk of, so the casual observer would have guessed right
. Having said that, did you try out the app? I think I have used pretty standard stuff inside – a Serif for the headings and a sans for all other text. I would be happy to send you guys the print-ready PDFs that we generate to get your feedback on them. I have tried to include whatever little I know about book typesetting and could implement.
Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it. Will try to find something more sober for the first screen also
Regards,
Abhaya
May it be this plugin?
http://en.pdf24.org/wordpress-pdf.jsp
best
a
Neither is the one–I don’t remember having the resulting PDF emailed anywhere. However, they do sound perfectly serviceable for what we’re talking about. I just remember the one I found simply deposited the PDF on my computer’s desktop.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I plan to try some of these PDF makers out when I get a chance and I’ll write up the results on my blog.
RE: favorite book fonts
Scala, Minion, Filosofia
They work also on coated paper stock and don’t have too much contrast which can make reading difficult.
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