choosing fonts for your paper and electronic documents

Choosing fonts for your paper and electronic documents

Helping you get published

When no journal ever allows its authors to specify the font in which their papers are eventually printed, the relevance of

this post may not be immediately clear. However, researchers also write letters and project proposals and project reports

and print out drafts of their research papers-and do not have to use Times New Roman or even Calibri, which is now the

default font in Microsoft Word. Why should they care? Well, they should care because the choice can make a difference to the ease with which documents can be read, whether printed on paper on read off a monitor. After all, Times New Roman

was designed nearly 80 years ago and that too for The Times of London and therefore, among other requirements,

had to be compact and suitable for printing on newsprint- our requirements are somewhat different.



Incidentally, Times New Roman, Calibri, Comic Sans, and many others are typefaces, not fonts, although the distinction

is seldom observed by users (and will be ignored here from now on). Arial, for example, is a typeface: 12-point Arial Bold

is a font; a font is thus a specific instance of a typeface whereas a typeface is about the design of individual letters,

numerals, and other symbols which stay more or less constant across different sizes and styles (bold, italics, and

small capitals). Such niceties aside, here are some factors you should consider in choosing a font,

Does the font have all the symbols I need? Different fonts are developed to meet different needs. A font developed for printing fairytales, for example, has no need for Greek letters

and mathematical signs anymore than a font for printing mathematics needs emoticons.


Will I be circulating the document widely? It is best to stick to fonts that come bundled with the operating systems if you plan to circulate the document and expect those who receive it to print it out. This is also true of PowerPoint presentations. If the font you have used is not installed on another machine, a substitute will be used instead and the two versions may not match page for page or line for line, and tables and figures may shift.

Will the document be read mostly on the screen? Georgia and Verdana, for example, were especially developed for screen reading. Try changing the text of a document you are reading on screen from Times New Roman to Georgia, and you will see the difference.

Do I wish to signal a particular tone? Formal documents such as project reports and business letters need to convey a formal tone, and some fonts are just right for the job (Constantia, for instance) but if you are designing a poster, you may want to consider other options.

Does every character need to be completely clear? Using Arial, for instance, it is not easy to tell apart a lowercase ‘ell' from an uppercase ‘eye'. In printing address labels, the choice of font is critical (postal codes, for instance, need to distinguish between a zero and the letter O). If you are giving URLs, the character string has to be unambiguous because context does not provide a clue.


Why not experiment with a number of fonts and see what works best for you?


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choosing fonts for your paper and electronic documents

Technology