Originally shared by Zenopus Archives
Futura for the win. It's the font used in the AD&D 1E MM, PHB and DMG, as well as Holmes Basic.
The link below was originally shared by Jeremy Whalen
http://blog.solopress.com/design-guide/top-5-most-popular-fonts-for-printing/
Personally I find Futura horrible as a font for the actual text/body. Headlines sure, but it's just not readable otherwise. I am considering using it for exactly that: headlines. The rest of the text in my will-probably-never-get-done RPG would be some kind of easy-on-the-eyes serif.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard any complaints about readability of the 1E AD&D books, but the body of the text in those is Futura Book or similar, with only the headers in standard Futura.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hahnlibrary.net/rpgs/tsrfonts.html
Great link, thank you. I am just a typographic snob. I know people have debated the sans/serif thing for decades, but to me it's rather obvious what I'd rather read big blocks of text in: serif.
ReplyDeleteFor those that read soft copies rather than actual prints, I've found to my distress that the proliferation of mobile devices and PDF reader software has added another dimension to this - not all fonts translate well between platforms. The switch between PC and Mac software seems to be a particular problem. The solution seems to be to stick with the most common electronic fonts to avoid situations where people's preferred method of reading PDFs doesn't support your preferred font.
ReplyDeleteWhile the accepted wisdom is that print is better in serif (Times New Roman) and on-screen in sans serif (Arial), there seem to be more people who have a problem with serif on screen than there are people who don't like sans serif in print. Consequently I've moved to Arial as my standard font - practicality has to outweigh preference in these cases.
You can avoid the platform issues by embedding the fonts you use into the PDF document itself. In LaTeX that's the default behavior these days so I don't have to do anything special, not sure how it works with other typesetting systems.
ReplyDeleteHere's an old example of a document set in two-column serif; the font choice for the headings is debatable, but I liked it at the time. :-) http://nilisnotnull.blogspot.com/2012/04/history-of-greyhawk-wars-pdf.html