Book fonts

What a book face has to do

The criteria for continuous reading are not the criteria for anything else you choose type for.

Real italics

Not a slanted version of the roman. A true italic is a separately drawn alphabet, and fiction uses italics constantly — for emphasis, thoughts, titles, letters, other languages.

A modest x-height

Faces designed for screens and signage have large x-heights, which reads as shouting across three hundred pages.

Old-style figures

Numerals that sit on the baseline with ascenders and descenders, rather than all-caps-height lining figures. They sit into text instead of interrupting it.

Small caps

Real ones, not letters scaled down — scaled capitals have the wrong stroke weight beside the text they sit in.

Language coverage

If your book uses accented characters, check they exist and are properly drawn rather than composed on the fly.

A licence that permits embedding

Both in a PDF and, if relevant, in an EPUB. These are separate permissions.

Faces used in book publishing

Open licence, free to embed commercially

• EB Garamond — a revival of Claude Garamond's types. The default recommendation for fiction.
• Crimson Pro — designed for book setting, with a full set of optical sizes.
• Libre Baskerville — a slightly wider Baskerville, comfortable at small sizes.
• Source Serif — Adobe's open serif. Cleaner and more contemporary than the revivals.
• Alegreya — designed specifically for literature, with a distinct texture on the page.
• Cardo — broad language coverage, including Greek and Hebrew. Useful for academic work.

Commercial faces common in publishing

• Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro — the two most-used book faces in English-language publishing.
• Sabon — Jan Tschichold's Garamond, designed to set identically in metal and photocomposition.
• Janson Text — a Kis revival. Slightly sharper than the Garamonds.
• Dante, Arno Pro — both drawn specifically for books, both hold up at small sizes.

Size, leading and measure

These three cannot be chosen independently — each constrains the others, and getting the relationship right matters more than which face you picked.

Size

10–12pt for the body. Two faces at the same nominal size can differ visibly in apparent size, so set a page and print it rather than trusting the number.

Leading

120–140% of the type size. A 11pt face wants roughly 14pt leading. Tighter looks cramped; looser makes the page grey.

Measure

60–75 characters a line. Wider and the eye loses its place on the return; narrower and justified text develops gaps.

Measure is the constraint that connects type to trim size: 12pt on a 4.25-inch page cannot produce a comfortable measure, whatever you do with the margins.

Licensing, which is where this goes wrong

Using a font to typeset a book on your own computer, and distributing a copy of that font inside a file, are different permissions. Exporting a PDF or an EPUB with a font embedded does the second.

• Most commercial licences permit PDF embedding, often as a subset containing only the characters you used.
• Many restrict or forbid EPUB embedding, because an EPUB is a zip file and the font can be extracted intact.
• Open licences — SIL Open Font License, Apache — permit both, including commercially.
• System fonts that came with your operating system are frequently NOT licensed for embedding. This is the one that catches people.