After doing all the research in Can I Use Apple Fonts to Publish My Book ? And other deep questions about using fonts for self-publishing, I got right to work creating paragraphs using various fonts. I decided to skip the one sentence step that I originally thought I would begin with and instead chose a medium short paragraph from the end of the third chapter in my children’s chapter book Lulu Faces a Debacle.
I have highlighted font names for ease of locating and clarity.
It was a very worthwhile exercise. I noticed right away that how I thought fonts would look based on how they showed up in the Font Book (the Apple software that houses my fonts, for you non-Mac users) example was not enough. The font Merriweather that I was leaning toward was quickly ruled out as too bold, even in its regular form. This was confirmed when my husband went over the fonts with me and said it was one of the fonts that seemed to scream at him off the page.
My process for comparing the fonts was this:
First, I copied the desired paragraph. Every time I pasted it on the document, I changed its font to one of those to compare and labeled in parentheses after the paragraph which font it was. Next, I printed the pages, since the main goal right now is choosing a font for a print book. I made sure to print single sided, since I wanted to look at all the fonts right next to each other as much as possible. (I’m told that ebooks automatically get a font assigned to them, and the reader can change fonts, as well)
At this point, I went through and marked which fonts seemed like contenders. Some got high marks and others seemed just okay. Several were out of the running right away. As I said, some were too bold. Some were too light or too widely spaced between letters or to tightly spaced between letters.
Then, I asked my husband to look at them and he made dots next to those that seemed more easy to read. Then we discussed things I had noticed and even with that discussion, I began to notice other things, like some letters were a touch longer.
I compared the open license fonts to the popularly recommended fonts I would probably have to pay for. I mentioned to my husband that the font Cormorant Garamond, that had originally been my first choice after the printing, was actually probably too light. He agreed. We decided the spacing on a couple of fonts we liked at first was not as easy to read.
After all of this comparison, I ended up choosing the font Alegreya, which hadn’t actually made the first cut! Goes to show that going over things more than once and with another person can really help you notice things.
Alegreya may be a touch more antique looking than Palatino, but it has the medium weight, length of characters, and general spacing that make it make it easy for us to read. I will probably look one more time before I change all of my book font to that. And I leave open the possibility that I may experiment with one of the other fonts along the way, before I submit the book for printing.
Below are photos of my font comparison pages. I notice that even looking at the photos I don’t get the same sense of the fonts as I do in print. I strongly recommend printing the fonts you want to compare! If you want a print out of my comparison, there is a pdf below. Feel free to comment!
Edits/Notes to self:
Many free fonts by Nick Curtis on fontspace.com, some overlap with the 550 group
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