Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "window"
Speaking of Fonts, I mean Typefaces
Oooh, typeface wars! An amusing blog post over on Melville House books picked up the question: What typeface (or font) do you use for your own writing? (See also this article at The Guardian.)
Oh, that's a fun, surprisingly controversial question! Let's pause here and read for a minute, shall we? *
Because I always work with plain vanilla text while writing and editing, I end up using some "readable" fixed-width font at about 12 points on screen. Sometimes I change it up for later drafts. My personal habit is to never compose or edit text with a WYSIWYG page layout program. Save that folderol for the book design phase. (Why? Begin rant. Page layout programs often suck for high-speed text composition and real editing because that's not what they're designed for. A powerful editor like EMACS, or some variety of look-alike, is best for getting words into a file quickly. Authors should spend time learning to separate content-generation from page design. End rant.)
So, my work-a-day editing typeface used to be one of the Courier or Courier-New family, or similar. These days it's Consolas. But good gack, Virginia, I would never publish something using one of those typefaces! Eww.
When typesetting the resulting book or story for paper publication, the "designers" at SROP most often set body text in one of these very-readable workhorses: Warnock Pro, Constantia, or Georgia. (They all have fairly robust x-heights, by the way, and work well for digital display as well as on cheap paper in modern high-speed printing applications. I generally steer clear of fonts with anemic x-heights. Just so ya know.)
Titles on covers and opening pages of SROP books are often set in something more interesting as a display type, though we rodents eschew overy frilly typefaces for most work. (Mantissa's novella The Princess on the Rock is a notable exception.)
When I need to specify something other than default font in an e-book because the text contains too many unusual characters, I'll use one of the Gentium family or maybe the Brill family.
Neither Times New Roman nor Arial nor Helvetica ever rear their heads in the SROP shop.
Hey! Now that I've revealed all... What typefaces do you prefer for your work?
________
P.S. Here are some examples from the SROP catalog...
Warnock Pro: A Harlot of Venus
Constantia: How the Feather Sisters Came to Rule the Night
Georgia: On the Klickitat
Gentium: The Aerian Weaver
________
* Hmm. Times New Roman may "win" in the mainstream world, but to this rodent the typeface looks like a row of escapees from a sardine can. Also, btw, if you're a social media junky you won't want to miss the original tweet-storm over on Twitter. Also, just btw, we never submit except in-house, so we don't care what other publishers require for manuscripts.
Oh, that's a fun, surprisingly controversial question! Let's pause here and read for a minute, shall we? *
Because I always work with plain vanilla text while writing and editing, I end up using some "readable" fixed-width font at about 12 points on screen. Sometimes I change it up for later drafts. My personal habit is to never compose or edit text with a WYSIWYG page layout program. Save that folderol for the book design phase. (Why? Begin rant. Page layout programs often suck for high-speed text composition and real editing because that's not what they're designed for. A powerful editor like EMACS, or some variety of look-alike, is best for getting words into a file quickly. Authors should spend time learning to separate content-generation from page design. End rant.)
So, my work-a-day editing typeface used to be one of the Courier or Courier-New family, or similar. These days it's Consolas. But good gack, Virginia, I would never publish something using one of those typefaces! Eww.
When typesetting the resulting book or story for paper publication, the "designers" at SROP most often set body text in one of these very-readable workhorses: Warnock Pro, Constantia, or Georgia. (They all have fairly robust x-heights, by the way, and work well for digital display as well as on cheap paper in modern high-speed printing applications. I generally steer clear of fonts with anemic x-heights. Just so ya know.)
Titles on covers and opening pages of SROP books are often set in something more interesting as a display type, though we rodents eschew overy frilly typefaces for most work. (Mantissa's novella The Princess on the Rock is a notable exception.)
When I need to specify something other than default font in an e-book because the text contains too many unusual characters, I'll use one of the Gentium family or maybe the Brill family.
Neither Times New Roman nor Arial nor Helvetica ever rear their heads in the SROP shop.
Hey! Now that I've revealed all... What typefaces do you prefer for your work?
________
P.S. Here are some examples from the SROP catalog...
Warnock Pro: A Harlot of Venus
Constantia: How the Feather Sisters Came to Rule the Night
Georgia: On the Klickitat
Gentium: The Aerian Weaver
________
* Hmm. Times New Roman may "win" in the mainstream world, but to this rodent the typeface looks like a row of escapees from a sardine can. Also, btw, if you're a social media junky you won't want to miss the original tweet-storm over on Twitter. Also, just btw, we never submit except in-house, so we don't care what other publishers require for manuscripts.
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The main purpose of this blog is to announce occasional additions and changes to the SROP catalog or the site. And it doubles as a soap-box from which to gesticulate and babble...
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