Good fonts to use when printing a book?

Old Hack said:

If your book isn't typeset properly then your readers are going to be put off it. They might not know why, or be able to explain what's wrong with it: but they might find it difficult to read for no obvious reason, or find that it jars on their nerves somehow.

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I agree. There are some basics that folks should know regarding setting up a book's guts. Most of that information can be found online or just going to your personal library and checking professionally developed books. Things like average words per line or number of lines on a page. These are actually pretty static bits of information that doesn't take a degree to find.

As for my Word analogy: you missed my point. It wasn't intended to imply that Word can set up a print file: read it again, and think about whether Word provides the equipment required for anyone to write a book properly. If that's too oblique for you, consider this: does owning a good pair of running shoes mean that you're suddenly a world-class runner? Or does having access to the best set of straightening-irons make you a brilliant hairdresser?

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No, it's not the shoes. But that would mean that typesetting is some kind of extremely difficult process that requires knowledge that isn't easily obtained.

At this point, I've yet to see why anyone would have to hire a typesetter if they're willing to put in the time to research. I get that some folks aren't willing to spend the time to do it, and would rather write. Can't knock that! But, some are dealing with a budget, and paying a typesetting to do something they can do themselves can be an unnecessary expense.

Tettsuo said:

I agree. There are some basics that folks should know regarding setting up a book's guts. Most of that information can be found online or just going to your personal library and checking professionally developed books. Things like average words per line or number of lines on a page. These are actually pretty static bits of information that doesn't take a degree to find.

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That's actually not all that important to a typesetter. That kind of thing is already determined before the typesetter receives the file; it's part of the type spec created by the designer.

Base line counts are determined by software when you initially bring the file over into the template, but you're going to end up with shitty tracking, poor kerning and many rivers.

Software can remove widows-and-orphans automatically but a trained typesetter will make better decisions about how to solve the problem. Sometimes you don't have to drop a line, or pick one up. Sometime tracking will resolve the problem, and create a more aesthetic result and resolve the widow/orphan.

Tettsuo said:

But that would mean that typesetting is some kind of extremely difficult process that requires knowledge that isn't easily obtained.

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There's a reason that most professional typesetters have a four year college degree in design, followed by two to four years of work under a master typesetter.

While I've worked professionally as a typesetter for Random House setting the Modern Library in the 1990s, my work was supervised and QA'd by a master typesetter or two years. While I had extensive training before that, I improved steadily over the course of the two years, but his eye could still spot needed improvements.

My last book for him was I think my 36 or 37 I'd set for him, and it was the first one he pronounced "finished" when I turned it in.

Tettsuo said:

At this point, I've yet to see why anyone would have to hire a typesetter if they're willing to put in the time to research.

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Because they want to produce a professional product that isn't $20.00 or more for 75K of words, and that is still easy to read and attractive?

By the time someone has purchased InDesign or Framemaker or Quark, they've already invested a fair chunk of cash. Why spend the money on software that you probably won't use as effectively as a professional, when you could instead hire a professional? You then spend your time writing another book, which will in turn help sell the first book when you release your second book.

I do think someone with a good eye and the right software can learn enough so that the book won't look like a text dump, but it's not going to look as good as it might if set by a professional.

There will likely be problems with baselines, especially in headers and footers, problems with punctuation, and problems with kerning and tracking. I suspect they'll also be using obliqued fonts, rather than true italic, they probably won't be using the full font metrics and of course the lower dpi for POD makes a difference in how you set the text because you lose resolution and definition.

I confess that I am dismayed at the dismissal of a skilled profession as something you can learn by reading a bit and using software.

thothguard51 said:

Arcadia,

I used to type in Times New Roman, 12 pitch. Then a publisher I submitted to would only accept in Courier, or New Courier. After converting from Roman to Courier, my 100,000 word novel gained about 30 pages. There is that much of a difference in the type set.

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Times and TNR are as Macdonald noted tight faces; they're meant to save on paper costs. Janson is another tight face.

I'd suggest not using Courier or Courier New for fiction, especially if you're self-publishing in print; they're designed to be fonts that can be read on even poor paper and ribbons (they predate computers, well, courier does) and still leave room for markup. Courier and other monospaced typefaces will generally raise the cover price of a book because they use more paper and ink.

Get the template your service provider of choice uses, and set at least a page of frontmatter, a chapter opening and two or three pages of text.

Take that sample and set the same text with two other typefaces you are considering, and save all three files.

Now print them out on a laser printer.

Compare them side by side. How do they look? How do they read? How do they compare with similar books from commercial publishers? What looks best? What best suits your book? Get other opinions too.

Medievalist said:

That's actually not all that important to a typesetter. That kind of thing is already determined before the typesetter receives the file; it's part of the type spec created by the designer.

Base line counts are determined by software when you initially bring the file over into the template, but you're going to end up with shitty tracking, poor kerning and many rivers.

Software can remove widows-and-orphans automatically but a trained typesetter will make better decisions about how to solve the problem. Sometimes you don't have to drop a line, or pick one up. Sometime tracking will resolve the problem, and create a more aesthetic result and resolve the widow/orphan.

There's a reason that most professional typesetters have a four year college degree in design, followed by two to four years of work under a master typesetter.

While I've worked professionally as a typesetter for Random House setting the Modern Library in the 1990s, my work was supervised and QA'd by a master typesetter or two years. While I had extensive training before that, I improved steadily over the course of the two years, but his eye could still spot needed improvements.

My last book for him was I think my 36 or 37 I'd set for him, and it was the first one he pronounced "finished" when I turned it in.

Because they want to produce a professional product that isn't $20.00 or more for 75K of words, and that is still easy to read and attractive?

By the time someone has purchased InDesign or Framemaker or Quark, they've already invested a fair chunk of cash. Why spend the money on software that you probably won't use as effectively as a professional, when you could instead hire a professional? You then spend your time writing another book, which will in turn help sell the first book when you release your second book.

I do think someone with a good eye and the right software can learn enough so that the book won't look like a text dump, but it's not going to look as good as it might if set by a professional.

There will likely be problems with baselines, especially in headers and footers, problems with punctuation, and problems with kerning and tracking. I suspect they'll also be using obliqued fonts, rather than true italic, they probably won't be using the full font metrics and of course the lower dpi for POD makes a difference in how you set the text because you lose resolution and definition.

I confess that I am dismayed at the dismissal of a skilled profession as something you can learn by reading a bit and using software.

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Thank you for the indepth information. This is what I was looking for.

So to use Courier, or other monospaced fonts, print would likely cost more because it uses more ink and paper. I can understand that...

thothguard51 said:

So to use Courier, or other monospaced fonts, print would likely cost more because it uses more ink and paper. I can understand that...

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Not so much monospaced or proportional, but the font itself. They're saying Times New Roman was designed for a very specific purpose. It was meant to save the newspaper money by getting more words onto a single piece of newsprint and to look good in narrow newspaper columns.

In general, for typesetting a simple fiction book from something like Createspace, it's not really rocket science. Use a professional serif'd font because those have all the stuff under the hood that will let a program set the face with the least human intervention. Medievalist had a great list. Print it out and look at it in the size it's going to be finally printed in. If nothing sticks out, it's probably ok.

Think about it this way though. If automatically set type was as unpopular as some might make out, we wouldn't see ebooks taking off in the way they are. All text on a kindle or epub file is typeset 100% automatically by definition.

Katie Elle said:

All text on a kindle or epub file is typeset 100% automatically by definition.

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Only if you're doing textdumps.

There's a reason I use hand-coded html and CSS. There's a reason I produce separate versions from html and css for Adobe .PDF, ePub, Kindle and mobi, and don't rely on software conversion.

My two favorite fonts are Times New Roman, and Trajan Pro (though Trajan pro more for covers and such).

You can't go wrong with TNR.

Katie Elle said:

Think about it this way though. If automatically set type was as unpopular as some might make out, we wouldn't see ebooks taking off in the way they are. All text on a kindle or epub file is typeset 100% automatically by definition.

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The trade publishers I've worked with recently employ people to typeset their e-books, and if this expense wasn't necessary to produce a quality end product, they wouldn't do it. The difference between e-books which have been typeset, and those which haven't, is clear when you look at them side by side.

I agree that the readers can adjust the formatting of the books they read to some extent--for example, enlarging the size of the font--but that's not the same thing as typesetting, as Lisa has already explained.

There are certainly things you can do to make ebooks look better, but we were talking earlier about print publication and things like tracking, kerning, rivers, widows, orphans, and manual hyphenation. Those were being put forward as the difference between a professional typeset book and one put together by a skilled amateur with modern layout software.

Well, those sorts of things don't exist in ebook formats. You don't determine where lines break or how the fonts are kerned or tracked. You don't even get to determine what font they're going to be viewed in. Readers seem to be accepting this all just fine.

Having lived through the 2009 era with badly OCRed ebooks and watching a significant number of of my "big six" published books on the PaperWhite have bugs with the KF8 format, I'm not sure that the professional publishing world is a really great example to put forth of the right way to do an ebook.

Katie Elle said:

Having lived through the 2009 era with badly OCRed ebooks and watching a significant number of of my "big six" published books on the PaperWhite have bugs with the KF8 format, I'm not sure that the professional publishing world is a really great example to put forth of the right way to do an ebook.

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I've not used a PaperWhite so I can't comment on how or why books might look bad on it. But I'm willing to bet that it's not only the Big Six/Five/Four which are producing books which don't display well on it right now, and it's disingenuous of you to suggest that's the case.

I agree that some trade publishers initially didn't cope too well with the transition from "mostly-print" to "lots of e-books", and that many of the conversions which have been made were inexcusably clumsy; but until you brought up the subject this wasn't a pissing contest about "self published vs. trade published", Katie, and I don't want it to become one.

Before you reply I suggest you go and look at a random selection of self published e-books. Not the best sellers: a real random selection. You'll find plenty of books which look awful, and are far clumsier than the worst that the trade press put out a few years ago. And if you don't, then you're not looking at a real average.

I'd like it if everyone--trade publishers and self publishers--knew better than to publish books which were sloppily written, edited, formatted and/or designed, but there are always people who don't recognise the skills required to produce the best books possible. I hope that AW, and threads like this, help a few people understand the difficulties involved and find a way around them. Let's focus on that, instead of trying to twist threads into a confrontational stance that benefits no one.

Katie Elle said:

There are certainly things you can do to make ebooks look better, but we were talking earlier about print publication and things like tracking, kerning, rivers, widows, orphans, and manual hyphenation. Those were being put forward as the difference between a professional typeset book and one put together by a skilled amateur with modern layout software.

Well, those sorts of things don't exist in ebook formats. You don't determine where lines break or how the fonts are kerned or tracked. You don't even get to determine what font they're going to be viewed in. Readers seem to be accepting this all just fine.

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Many of them do exist. In fact when I helped create the ePub file format standard, we included font specs related to handling kerning and tracking because we knew that screen resolutions would change, and that mean so would the appearance of text on the screen. Moreover, there's a lot you can do with XHTML and a lot that even Kindle's basic readers support, never mind what you can do in the Fire.

When you condense spaces, for instance, you're typesetting. We did that even in the 1990s when ebooks were new. Sure, it's not tracking to 1/1000 of an em, but it's useful. So are things like non-breaking spaces, again, another typesetting choice. So are things like using extra white space to offset chapter openers or blockquotes, without engaging in amateur hour hijinks with extra paragraph tags.

If you're producing books for Acrobat, or for Apple's new iBooks Author standards (for iPad only), you also have access to a number of typgraphical controls and typesetting features that you don't have for E Ink displays.

But even on E Ink, even on Kindle or Mobi, when you use CSS to create a faux drop cap, you're still typesetting. When you properly use an en-dash instead of an em-dash, you're typesetting.

Katie Elle said:

Having lived through the 2009 era with badly OCRed ebooks and watching a significant number of of my "big six" published books on the PaperWhite have bugs with the KF8 format, I'm not sure that the professional publishing world is a really great example to put forth of the right way to do an ebook.

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I'm certainly not pointing to any specific big 5 publisher as "the right way," but I sure as hell do know the right way, and it isn't relying on software conversion from Microsoft Word to MobiPocket or Calibre. Ebook production can be done correctly via scripted export from Quark or InDesign, but you have to know your way around CSS and scripting, and you still need to perform QA and user testing.

This is the stage that caught many publishers off guard in the initial push to meet demand for Kindle books. But they've figured out a lot since then, and are rapidly creating production workflows that include QA.

The next major thing I'd like to see ebook production works incorporate are QA stages that include live users testing on multiple platforms, with a QA feature set checklist.

Personally, I prefer to produce Kindle/AMZW and mobi books by hand, beginning with custom css and very vanilla HTML. I also create the metadata files by hand, using a template create for each specific file and vendor. I'll use the same vanilla html file as the starting point for an epub, with a fork for Adobe ePUB vs iBooks ePub.

The best source of information I know of about creating ePub format books is Liz Castro. Her blog is here; her book EPub Straight to the Point is exceedingly useful.

Old Hack said:

If your book isn't typeset properly then your readers are going to be put off it. They might not know why, or be able to explain what's wrong with it: but they might find it difficult to read for no obvious reason, or find that it jars on their nerves somehow.

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Old Hack is right on the money!

I've been a book designer and typesetter for over 30 years. Here's an article I wrote about how book design affects readability (and thank you, Old Hack, for inviting me to your blog back in 2009).

http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com/2009/05/guest-post-how-book-design-affects.html

Maggie! How lovely to see you here!

To anyone who doesn't know Maggie, she's a typesetter and a writer, and is generally lovely. The article she wrote for my blog is great, too.

Old Hack said:

I hope that AW, and threads like this, help a few people understand the difficulties involved and find a way around them.

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I've been lurking on this thread on and off since it started--I already knew typesetting is an art unto itself, but I had no idea what exactly goes into creating a trade-published book. Thank you, Old Hack and Medievalist. This is fascinating stuff!

To Arcadia Divine: I prefer Garamond. My time in a college art program taught me that Times New Roman is for newspapers (and that's where my formal education in typesetting began and ended) and I loathe TNR's apostrophes and commas.

Ann;
I'm in the process of selecting a POD publisher for my novel, now on KDP. If you don't mind my asking, did you self-publish, if so, with whom, and what was your experience?

Vincenzo said:

Ann;
I'm in the process of selecting a POD publisher for my novel, now on KDP. If you don't mind my asking, did you self-publish, if so, with whom, and what was your experience?

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Hi Vincenzo. I don't mind your asking at all. I did self-publish, in October of 2012. I didn't use a POD, but I believe you will find quite a few threads on here that detail different people's experiences with POD. I think many of them have used Createspace and seem satisfied with it.

As for me, I have a FB friend that told me about an old school chum of hers that owns a printing company with her husband 10 to 15 minutes from my house. I made an appointment with them and went out to discuss what I wanted to do, prices, etc. That gave me a chance to see the quality of their work. We clicked, and long story short, she had a designer that put my cover together with the photo I provided, and after we worked out what needed to be worked out, I had a number of them printed.

I have a thread chronicling my journey thus far called, "My 3 Reasons For Self-Pubbing & Sales Updates on Print and ebooks." Check it out & the other self-pubbing threads and see what you can glean from them. If there's any thing I can help you with, let me know.

Torgo said:

Just to say: software is a terrible, terrible type designer. Don't rely on software to typeset your book any more than you would rely on it to edit your book.

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So . . . you go back to what Gutenberg did, or what?

caw

To put this into perspective I typeset my own book and it took me about a week to do. The software is only capable of so much and if you know what you are doing it can be done well. For instance, if you set up paragraph and character styles in InDesign, you can easily set the type and adjust size on the fly by editing the style, then generating a TOC based on the style. I typeset all body copy in Garamond and then used a unique font for headings that matched the book title on the cover along with decorative paragraph separators. I also had to go in by hand and remove orphans and widows. To set the design apart I also made all chapters start on the right side. There were also decorative lines on either side of my page numbers which I created with master pages so they automatically populated and I could turn off the master on the blank pages opposite new chapters.

Better question: How do you get a degree in typesetting? I did a couple (albeit brief) searches and couldn't find the info. What's the actual title? And what's the course work like?

(I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I'm really curious, and frustrated that my Google-fu skills are failing this badly)

It's generally a series of courses in a design degree, then you work under the supervision of a senior typesetter.

At UCLA you generally take courses in calligraphy, and you learn to set cold type as well.

I was atypical, and would not describe my self as a true pro.

I already had some experience setting cold type and working with a lino, so in the early 1990s, I worked under a senior typesetter and designer who created specs for me to use in QuarkExpress. I worked for two years passing all my work by a supervisor at Random House; the last book I did for them, Les Mise, was the first one that he had no corrections/suggestions to improve.

After that I used FrameMaker for software documentation and consumer books, a task that uses very different kinds of type and design than say, classic novels from the canon, then I moved to InDesign and scholarly books and poetry for university presses. Very early this century I started specializing in terms of mixed writing systems and non Roman systems, etc. and the issues around them and software and ebook, and Unicode development and support.

So I'm not at all the model to look too. You might ask MaggieDana.

aibrean said:

I also had to go in by hand and remove orphans and widows.

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Did you use tracking or just insert breaks?

Often you can have InDesign flag widows and orphans, but may be able to remove them with judicious tracking rather than adding or dropping a line.

Medievalist said:

Did you use tracking or just insert breaks?

Often you can have InDesign flag widows and orphans, but may be able to remove them with judicious tracking rather than adding or dropping a line.

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I wasn't happy how the rest of the paragraph was lining up (really jagged). Luckily there were only minimal problem spots. Tracking was definitely a friend

I also had to make sure all the quote/apostrophe marks were typographer-styled (from importing in Word, some of them were lost from copy/pasting from other places like Write or Die) and in the correct direction.