Welcome to July. We’ve passed the halfway point of the year and it’s all downhill from here. I don’t know where anybody else is at, but I’m behind on a few things like reading as many books as I’d like to and staying on top of finishing these short story drafts I have in the works. I am not working my day job this week so maybe I’ll catch up; or maybe I’ll spend the time laying around doing nothing. Both are productive things to do.
Today’s Shelf Life is about fonts. I love fonts. Who doesn’t love fonts? Show of hands: Who reading has seen the documentary Helvetica? If not, you should watch it. It’s so good. I think I may have watched it at work with a bunch of colleagues but I can’t remember. I’ve seen it a few times.
Everything there is to know about fonts can’t fit in one Shelf Life article but that’s okay because today’s essay is not about fonts generally but about fonts for publishing and what you need to know about them if you, as the author, decide to compose your book into pages for print. I don’t profess to know everything about fonts, but I know enough to get by in publishing editorial operations and I suspect that’s already kind of a lot.
I decided to write this article about choosing and using fonts for print after I saw a post on the web from a person who couldn’t quite believe that fonts are proprietary and you can be sued for using them. Will you be sued for using a font you don’t have the right to use? Depends, but probably not. Can you be sued for this? Absolutely. Like stock images, fonts have rights and permissions that govern their use. Just because you can download one doesn’t mean you can reproduce it in a commercial product without repercussions.
If you haven’t already, check out my previous article Creating a Well-Turned Page on the basics of typesetting for authors, which touches on adjacent issues to those in today’s Shelf Life.
Let’s begin at the beginning: What is a font, exactly? Here’s a brief font glossary so we can all work with a shared vocabulary for the rest of the article.
Typeface—A collection of characters that share a common design; typefaces are made up of one or more fonts. For instance, Helvetica is a typeface.
Font—A set of characters that share a common typeface and style; Helvetica Light Condensed, Helvetica Narrow Roman Oblique, and Helvetica Ultra Compressed are fonts in the Helvetica typeface collection.
Glyph—Any single character that is part of a font; fonts are made up of many glyphs, including lowercase and uppercase letters, numerals, punctuation, and other symbols like fractions.
When you, as an author on a self-publishing journey, set your book up for electronic publication as an ebook (for example, a book for sale on Kindle), the font you use is fairly immaterial in the end product. The end user (in this example, the Kindle owner) can control what font displays on their device for ease of reading and the fonts any given user has on their Kindle are not your responsibility as the author. Kindle displays text in one of its two proprietary fonts (Bookerly serif and Ember sans serif), or one of the traditional fonts Amazon has licensed for use on Kindle (for instance, Helvetica, Baskerville, and Palatino), or one of the fonts that the user has downloaded and installed on their personal device. It doesn’t matter if you intended your book to be read in Papyrus font and set it up that way; that’s not what the user will see.
If you decide to make your book available in print, however, that’s another story. Whatever typefaces and fonts you select for your text and display will be reproduced exactly as set on the page (if you set your PDF up correctly, that is). The end user has no control over the display because it’s, you know, printed on a piece of paper. This means you have to take responsibility for the legal aspects of using the fonts, consider the technical limitations of the fonts, and ensure you are making accessible choices and following best practices for readability with the fonts you choose.
That sounds like a lot, but as long as you don’t get too creative it’s really easy not to go wrong. Typesetting the interior of a book is not where you want to get creative. People get a wild hair to do this sometimes—“What if I set my book all in sepia-brown text to enhance the old-timey feel?” “What if I set each character’s dialogue in a different font to represent their personality?” “What if I set alternating chapters in this cool typewriter font to indicate. . . .” Listen, I don’t have enough page real estate in this newsletter to tell you why these are all terrible ideas but if you get a notion to do one of these things or something like one of these things do not do that thing.
At the end of today’s article I’ll recommend a handful of font pairings that are free to use, contain comprehensive glyph sets, and won’t make your book look like a drunk teenager typeset it.
Legal Concerns
Since I lead with a dire warning about being sued for using the wrong font, I’d better start here. First: You are unlikely to be sued for using a font you don’t have the rights to use in your indie-published book given the visibility level of the commercial product. Meaning, if you didn’t have the commercial rights for Helvetica and you ran it in an international advertisement getting tens of millions of impressions per day, that’s much more visible than using Helvetica in a book with a print run of 25 or 50 copies.
Further, if you were caught using a font you didn’t have rights to and the rights-owner really wanted to pursue the issue, you’d likely just be asked to pay for a license.
If you have a legally obtained copy of a word processing software (even a free software like Google Docs) and you use a font that came with that software, you’re not going to have a problem. The fonts available in Google Docs are free to use and the ones that come packaged in with software like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are licensed along with the software. You’re good to go.
Where you could run into a problem is if you really wanted to use a particular font and downloaded it on the web without paying for it. For instance if you really like the look of, say, Minion Pro (which I do) and you’re like “heck, I’m not paying hundreds of dollars for a font I’ll just find a free download somewhere”—almost certainly nobody is coming after you for having a pirated copy of Minion Pro on your computer because you like how it looks when you’re typing. But if you use it in a product that you make available in exchange for cash money (like a print book you’re selling on Amazon) then you’ve opened yourself to liability.
Bottom line: Use a font you own. If you absolutely must have a particular font and you want to use it in a commercial product, license it or hire a professional with a license to do the work.
Technical Considerations
Not all fonts are created equal—from a technical standpoint. There are two big technical reasons why a font might not be suitable for your project.
It doesn’t contain all the glyphs you need.
The resolution of the font is not suitable for print.
I’ll address item 2 first because it’s easier to dispatch. You almost certainly do not have to worry about the resolution of the font you choose. I think this used to be a bigger concern than it is now. If you’re using a well-known font there’s almost no chance you’re going to run into resolution issues at the printer. If you’re using a font that an indie font creator made on their home computer, maybe just print a few test pages to make sure the font looks crisp and antialiased at the size it will be in your book (10 or 11 point is pretty standard for body text).
Glyphs are another story. When a font maker creates a font, they have to create a glyph for each character for it to be available to the user. Some fonts have more glyphs than others. Calibri, for instance, has a few thousand glyphs: Your “standard” Latin capital and lowercase letters and Arabic numerals (the ones we use in English all the time); the Latin letters with different diacriticals, like the é and the ç; Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek letters; mathematic symbols like unequal-to and the multiplication sign (which is not the same character as the lowercase letter x!); a series of stacked fractions including unusual ones like 3/8, 5/8, and 7/8; and a bunch of typesetting characters like the non-breaking hyphen and the non-breaking space.
Courier, on the other hand, has like 240 glyphs.
“I don’t need thousands of glyphs, I just want to typeset my book!” The number of glyphs you need depends on the type of book you wrote. While almost every font includes stacked fractions like ½, ¼, and ¾, many fonts don’t contain the less-used fraction stacks mentioned above. This is probably fine if you wrote a romance novel, but if you wrote a cookbook you’re going to need those stacked fractions (or else you’ll need to set every fraction as numeral-slash-numeral for consistency).
Bottom line: If you’re choosing a font off the beaten path, make sure it includes all the glyphs you need. Examine the character map to confirm.
Readability and Best Practices
I’ll put the most important best practice first which is this:
Don’t get fancy with fonts.
Not for the interior of your book. Title page? Sure, go wild. Actual book block that people will spend hours reading? Please no.
For the interior of many books—novels, for instance—two typefaces is all you need. A body text face and a display face. The display face is for your chapter titles, subheadings, running heads, and so on. The body text is your main text font. That’s it. That’s all you need.
If you have a recurring special element, for instance, an epigraph to each chapter, you might think this is a great opportunity to bring in a third typeface but in my opinion you’re really better off sticking with your two faces and bringing in a different style. For instance, if your main body text is 10-point Georgia Pro and your display face is Proxima Nova, then you might use 10-point Georgia Pro Condensed Light for your chapter epigraphs. This indicates that it’s different from the main body text but still part of the chapter, and you don’t have to bring in a third face.
A great strategy is to choose a sans serif font and a serif font and use one for text and one for display. Common wisdom is that serif faces should be used for text in print and sans serif for display; people will tell you that the little serifs on a serif font face make it easier to read on the printed page. However, there’s no science backing this up. As far as readability goes, serif and sans serif faces are equally easy to read in print. Serif faces tend to look more classic and traditional while sans serif faces tend to give a cleaner and more modern appearance. That’s it.
Choose one serif typeface and one sans serif typeface that coordinate and use one font from each typeface. Bring in another font from one of those typefaces if you absolutely need a third option.
Even for your display face, you should avoid ornate and complicated fonts. Scripts (cursive-looking faces), medieval-style fonts, and illustrative fonts can be difficult to read for many people, impossible to read for people with visual impairments or who use reading assistive technology, and frankly look amateurish most of the time.
Bottom line: Papyrus. Not even once.
Perfect Pairs
Herewith, a few of my favorite typeface pairings for you. All of these are free to use (no licensing restrictions), contain robust glyph sets, and will make your book look like a professional typeset it.
First up: Lora (serif) and Montserrat (sans serif). These fonts are both licensed under the Open Font License and contain plenty of glyphs (they both have 700+). Here’s a sample of Montserrat display with Lora body.
Next pairing: Libre Baskerville (serif) and Raleway (sans serif). Again, these fonts are both under the Open Font License. Both Libre Baskerville and Raleway contain all the stacked fractions you could need, even if you’re writing a cookbook. Here’s how they look together with Raleway display and Libre Baskerville body.
Final pairing: Roboto (sans serif) and . . . Roboto Slab (serif). I switched it up here and used the sans serif font for the body text and the serif font for the display. I like the Roboto typeface family very much and you can’t go wrong with a slab serif and a sans serif from the same design mind to make sure they coordinate.
Please join me in saying domo arigato, Mr Roboto, and let’s call it a day.
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