Art Campbell wrote: > I think it depends on the application, how the documents are > delivered, and what the company's stanard fonts (part of the corporate > "look," or branding, are). > > The other thing you should know is that for some reason, picking fonts > amounts to a religious war with odd fervor among the participants. So > you're unlikely to get one good answer. > > If I were you, I'd start with Adobe's Type Primer > http://www.adobe.com/education/pdf/type_primer.pdf > > For material that will be printed or delivered via PDF and likely to > be printed by the customer, I usually use a serif body font and serif > heads. The one I'm working in now uses Palatino and Avant Garde. If > the material will only be on-screen and/or web, I'd go with serif > fonts for both body and heads, and I'd pick one that was designed for > on-screen display -- very few are, or were. Verdana is one of them. > Arial is not.... Most type foundries today will have a few. > > If you want more detail, on why, Google "font readability research"
Good advice, except for the serif / sans serif confusion. Serifs are the little embellishing strokes, usually more or less horizontal, at the tops and bottoms of letters. They help to guide your eye along a line of text as you read. Palatino is indeed a serif font, but Avant Garde, Verdana, and Arial are all sans serif fonts. Most people agree that sans serifs are preferable for the comparatively low resolution of a computer screen. Oh, yeah -- and among serifs, Palatino rules! Anyone who doesn't agree is an uncouth barbarian! ;-) Richard Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-777-0436 ------