Kerning and tracking are still not well supported in HTML/CSS and so the subtle things you can do with ligatures and other typesetting features in print are still missing for many digital reading experiences.” Some don’t work well as they are resized up or down. “Many lightweight fonts don’t hold up with all types of devices or across all backgrounds. “There are still fonts that don’t look good on screens,” says McCloy-Kelley. However, as Liisa McCloy-Kelley, VP and director of Ebook Product Development & Innovation, Penguin Random House, explains, the most fundamental reason that print fonts aren’t 1:1 with e-book fonts comes down to technical limitations. And then, there’s the simplest of all realities that prevents publishers from providing their own fonts: Many e-book readers don’t even default to the Publisher’s Font, so any extra effort or investment put forth by the publisher would be lost to the reader.
Neither of these steps are usually taken due to cost and conversion logistics (every e-book seller converts books to their own formats a little bit differently anyway). The Publisher’s Font you see on Kindle has to be licensed separately, and embedded in the e-book file that could show on countless iterations of screen sizes and display ratios. The problem is only compounded by the fact that the font Thompson chooses for a print book very rarely makes it to an e-book version. “And it’s not something that anyone is going to pull their hair out over, but all of that to say is, the beauty of the Kindle is the reader has so much control, but that does compete with what a printed type designer is doing.” “If I set a book in 11-point font, and you wanted to read it on 12 or 10 on a Kindle, that’s going to change the way that the words are placed on the page,” Thompson says. However, when one of Thompson’s designs is ported to Kindles and iBooks, all the formatting magic is destroyed. Her test of her own work is often to squint at the page, and see if the words blur together into orderly blocks of text. “The one thing I would say is, if you don’t notice the design, in some ways, I’ve succeeded,” she says. Thompson wants the book’s text to feel thematically tied to the source material–so she’ll pick different fonts for books on cooking than she would meditation than she would Shakespeare than she would pop literature–but it also has to be comfortable to read. It’s, like much of design, a combination of art and ergonomics. So there are all these tweaks you do, maybe the font is a little bigger, or you make the gutter margin a little bit wider because it’s thicker, so when you unfold the book, you’re not going to get your text creeping too close to the center of the line.” Books are still printed in signatures of 16 pages, which means your book has to fall on a multiple of 16. “There’s a lot of little nuanced things that go into picking a font, and sometimes it’s about the cast-off of a book–that’s basically the number of pages in a book. “As far as a print is concerned, I’ll read a manuscript, pick up the nuances, think about the origin of a font, and an origin of a story,” Thompson says.
Print technology didn’t change much for 500 years, but screen display technology changes every three to four years or so, a lagging effect of Moore’s Law.” “There should be, to keep up with technology. “Thinking specifically of e-readers, there is a difference between those that use LCD screens, much like smartphones and computer screens, and those that use e-ink, but, I don’t know of reading speed tests comparing them,” he says. “I recently read nearly every important book, and many of the important papers, on the study of legibility from 1905 to the present….nearly all the good ones say that it is very difficult or nearly impossible to find statistically significant differences in intrinsic legibility between common typefaces read at common sizes and normal distances,” says Bigelow.īigelow does point out that most typographical research has been performed through words printed on paper, and this should probably be rectified. The general school of thought is that sans serifs work well at tiny sizes, but serifs rule for longer reading.Ĭharles Bigelow, retired distinguished professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, and co-creator of the popular Lucida family of typefaces and Wingdings, disagrees. You have serifs (think Times New Roman) and sans serifs (think Helvetica). There are two major approaches to designing letters. Can A Typeface Actually Help You Read Faster?