Friday, April 22, 2011

Font suggestion needed

What font should I use for the regular text in the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules? I want to use a serif font for sure, so that it's more readable. Several people have told me that Times New Roman is boring to the eye.

But I don't have the artistic-layout "eye" to gauge what other fonts might work well.

This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone ... help ...


Georgia seems to be a pretty good font...

17 comments:

  1. Yes, please nix Times New Roman. It evokes either newspapers or Microsoft (... or occasionally tasteful blogs such as you own). You might try Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, or Garamond. These can be be a bit large on the page, so where you might have a TNR as 12pt, you might want these at 11pt.

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  2. I've always liked Garamond on dead trees.

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  3. Considering the old school look you are probably going for, I would suggest Footlight, GoldenType, Stratford, Swift, TenseC, or VremyaFWF. Centaur is pretty appropriate thematically, but the serifs are fairly small. Cushing is also borderline, with a more Victorian feel. Journal could also work, but it is a little plain.

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  4. If you can't find any of those for free, just email me and I will hand them over.

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  5. I love the font used in Humanspace Empires, you should really ask The Drune on ixians.blogspot.com about it ^^

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  6. Garamond seconded and please. :) It's pretty and very readable. It's the standard font I've been using for RPG work.

    Arno is also nice.

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  7. Garamond is a very good choice. Linux Libertine is another good font (not just for Linux, despite the name).

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  8. Good suggestions so far. :)

    Fontin is also rather nice and comes in both serif and sans.

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  9. As they say, "when in doubt, use Caslon".

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  10. I really like Gentium. It's free and a joy to read in print.

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  11. Garamond is great. But make sure you get a good cut, Adobe Garamond Pro has some lovely Opentype features, such as swash caps, alternates and ligatures which, if used sparingly can add real character - italic/swash titles - amazing! (You'll need opentype compatible layout - InDesign, not OpenOffice).

    I also like Palatino as a bookface.

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  12. Adobe Caslon (or Gentium for a good royaltyfree typeface)

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  13. Another vote here (from a guy who's looked at a lot of serif body text typefaces) for Adobe Caslon. Adobe Garamond is good too, but for whatever reason it might be a little more 'formal' than what you want.

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