Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
We’ve come a long way from Pica and Elite. Today there’s an almost
unlimited number of font styles and sizes to use in your writing
What’s Inside . . .
projects and tons of ways to use them. Fonts are addictive with many
of us constantly adding to our collections. For scrapbookers, fonts add Legibility 2
to the design of a well-crafted page. For self-publishers, they impact
both the design and the readability of your document. Readability 2
Terms of the Trade 2
This guide takes a look at the principles of typography and discusses
the issues that will affect your family history project. Learn how to Font Types 3
make your publication easier to read and to use type to pull the Fonts and Layout 5
reader’s eye to the things you want to emphasize.
Resources 7
Word Processing for Publishers Series - A Typography Primer
Legibility
The typeface designer creates a font style so that each character is
easily distinguished from the others. Your responsibility is to choose
fonts that make it easy for your readers to read your narrative. Does
this mean you shouldn’t use those great fonts you love? No. What it
does mean is that decorative and script font styles are hard on the
reader’s eye and should be reserved for decorative and impact
purposes, not in long swaths of body text.
Readability
Readability is your responsibility. Here, you are helping your readers
move through your publication without straining their eyes. This
becomes an issue in longer texts, like books. There’s a reason you’re
seeing more “large type” books on the market - readability for older
eyes. Readability includes not only the choice of font style, but font
size, character and word spacing, line length and spacing between
lines.
Font Types
There are two groups of type - serif and san-serif. There’s a
huge number of font groups. What’s the difference? While
there are all kinds of fonts, not all are suitable for the body text
- or type - of a publication. The Silly Sister font may be great
for a scrapbook page, but it would be a big headache (literally)
for anyone trying to read a 150 page family history.
The serif type group has little widgies - called serifs - at the
end of each stroke as shown in this example. San-serif
typefaces do not. Serif fonts have been considered more
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Word Processing for Publishers Series - A Typography Primer
readable with the serifs helping to lead the eye across the lines. San-
serif typefaces are traditionally used for headlines as they are
considered more legible when used in large sizes. These are the tried-
and-true principals from centuries of printing experience.
C o m p a r e t h e r e a d a b ilit y o f t h is p a r a g r a p h w it h t h e o n e
a b o v e . A s id e -b y -s id e n a r r a t iv e c o m p a r is o n c a n s p o t lig h t
is s u e s w it h d if f e r e n t t y p e f a c e s t h a t b r ie f t e x t s a m p le s w o n ’t .
Y e s , y o u w a n t t o c h o o s e a t y p e f a c e t h a t s u p p o rt s
t h e s t y le o r t h e m e o f y o u r w r it in g p r o j e c t , b u t it
s h o u ld s t ill b e a r e a d a b le o n e if y o u r w a n t y o u r A magazine-style
pullout using a
r e a d e r s t o fi n is h y o u r p u b lic a t io n .
decorative font can catch the reader’s
Does this mean you need to give up on all those great eye and point her to a specific point
fonts you’ve collected? Not at all. They are good choices
for graphical elements that catch the eye and give within the narrative.
emphasis to parts of your project. Select a handwriting
font for an excerpt from a letter or journal to draw the eye
to the complete transcription within the narrative. A magazine-style pullout using a
However, you still must consider legibility and readability decorative font can catch the reader’s
when making your choices. Which of these examples do eye and point her to a specific point
you find more readable? within the narrative.
Decorative fonts are good choices for headings as they
will help set the tone of your project. The headlines in this
guide use a sort of grungy font in gray instead of black to give a
vintage look - also supported by the graphic masthead at the top of the
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Word Processing for Publishers Series - A Typography Primer
piece. That same font would be very difficult to read in long swaths of
smaller text but it’s quite legible as a headline.
What is the difference between a typeface and a font? A typeface is a
character set designed in a specific style. One typeface usually
includes multiple fonts. For example, the common Arial typeface
includes the Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, Arial Extended and Arial
Round MT Bold fonts, among others. The term font is often
interchanged with typeface, which is fine as long as you realize that
there is a difference.
Speaking of fonts, as you browse font collections you will find them
grouped into several common categories including decorative, script,
old style, casual and many more. These are used to help you find just
the font you need. There are three font technologies that can impact
your use of a font. PostScript Type 1 are professional quality fonts
designed for printing needs. TrueType fonts were created for Windows
systems and work well on screen-based projects. OpenType combines
the best of both worlds with great support for documents distributed in
PDF (portable document format).
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Word Processing for Publishers Series - A Typography Primer
Resources
The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams
Typography article at About.com: Desktop Publishing
Typography article at Wikipedia
I Love Typography blog
Font sites:
• Fonts.com
• The Scriptorium A Typography Primer
by Denise Barrett Olson
• exlibris This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
• FontSite.com Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License. To view a copy of this license,
• Urban Fonts (free page) visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second
• Identifont (free page) Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,
USA.
Many font downloads include a text file describing how that font is licensed. Read
these licenses before using the font as it can impact how and where you can use the For more information regarding this publication contact
font. me at http://moultriecreek.us or by email at
author@moultriecreek.us.