Fonts: What do you use to write papers, articles, etc...

aplnubaplnub
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
After reading through the font wars in this thread, I thought it would be nice to know what font people use to write school papers, brochures, letters, articles, basically anything they feed into a word processing program like Word, Nisus, etc.



I have always used Verdana because I like to standardize from the web page to the paper but with all the elegant font talk, I am ready to make a change when writing articles and papers but I am not a font expert by any means. I just want something easy on the eyes and attractive.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    slewisslewis Posts: 2,081member
    Null.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    bobmarksdalebobmarksdale Posts: 744member
    Times new Roman is mandated for all papers in my classes (English mostly although I had to do some research in Biology once...). Otherwise I don't really care as long as I can read it.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    mrtotesmrtotes Posts: 760member
    Arial 12pt, becuase that's what work makes us use for everything (one corporate image ;-) ) and I can't seem to get out of the habit at home!



    Good job Apple and M$ continued to agree to support Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana etc on OS X. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/08/02font.html
  • Reply 4 of 8
    galleygalley Posts: 971member
    Arial on my work PC, Helvetica on my MacBook.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    It depends a lot on the output medium. If it's PDF, which is quite the norm for me, then font compatibilty is a non-issue. To be fair, this is why MS Word's day are numbered. It won't be long before there are nice word processors that can operate directly within PDFs. As PDFs are already the de-facto document standard, it's the end of the story.



    That rant aside, I tend not to use sans-serif fonts for main body text. I do often use Helvetica and Verdana (or similar) for captions, but due to the uniformity of the letters, they can be tiring to read. Serif fonts exist and evolve because they adopt technologies that people have found make text easier to read. I tend to like a wide-set serif like the traditional "New York" on the Mac, but also Garamond or even better, Book Antiqua. Book Antiqua has a particulary thick stroke, which I like. The Word template I use at work to produce memos, white papers, and the like uses mainly Book Antiqua. I like New York better, but Word is shit and can't embed fonts reliably. Everyone at my company has Book Antiqua.



    For marketing collateral or anything that needs to look snappy, there are a few mildly-serif fonts that work well. Adobe's default "Myriad" is nice for titling but is over-used. Despite being sans serif, Gill Sans is a good but common choice as well for body text. Other nice, modern-looking fonts are Kepler and the somewhat new Hypatia Sans that Adobe gives gratis when you purchase CS3. The mildly-serif font type has become quite posh lately, so there are more varieties everyday.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Easy. Whatever the publisher wants. Normally, that's Times [New Roman] or Computer Modern (LaTeX's default font - positively gorgeous for publications).
  • Reply 7 of 8
    electric monkelectric monk Posts: 485member
    I prefer Adobe Garamond Pro, if no font is mandated.



    Palatino is nice too (Palatino Linotype if you're on Windows), Book Antiqua is a rip-off of it but pretty decent nonetheless.



    If you're looking for interesting fonts Typographica has their best of 2004 fonts, 'part one' of their best of 2005 fonts (there was no part two) and best of 2006 fonts.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Electric Monk View Post


    I prefer Adobe Garamond Pro, if no font is mandated.



    Palatino is nice too (Palatino Linotype if you're on Windows), Book Antiqua is a rip-off of it but pretty decent nonetheless.



    Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, my work PC doesn't have Palatino, as it is a Windows craptop. I of course like Palatino, which has the added benefit of being a Postscript font. I find Palatino very easy to read on-screen, even when poorly rendered in Windows. I don't think a lot of people realize this, or we'd see it more often. Times, TNR, and Garamond are too light to look nice in Windows.



    For the record, I have some "PowerToy" installed on my Windows laptop that improves the font rendering. I forget what it's called exactly, but it's from MS and shouldn't be too hard to find. Most people don't have this, though.
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