Choosing a typeface for the body of a book
A reader should finish a chapter without having formed an opinion about the type. If they look up and think "what a lovely font," something has gone slightly wrong: that attention came out of the story.
This makes a body face a different kind of choice from a cover face. On a cover, type performs. Inside a book, type carries. The qualities that make a face good at carrying are unglamorous, mostly invisible, and only show themselves over hundreds of pages.
What matters at 10 or 11 points
You are not choosing a face by how it looks in a specimen set at 60 points. You are choosing how it behaves at reading size, repeated a quarter of a million times.
- A moderate x-height. The x-height is the height of a lowercase x against the capitals. Too small and the text looks faint. Too large and the ascenders and descenders shorten, word shapes flatten, and the page reads as a wall of gray. Good text faces sit in a narrow middle band, which is part of why they look so similar to each other.
- Sturdy strokes, not heavy ones. A face with genuinely hairline thins looks elegant on screen and breaks up on cream uncoated paper. A face that is too heavy prints as a dark page and tires the eye by chapter three.
- Open counters. The counter is the enclosed white inside an e, a, o or g. Ink spreads slightly on book paper, and a face with tight counters fills in — at speed, the es start reading as os.
- A true italic. A real italic is a separate design with its own letterforms, not the roman slanted over. A novel leans on italic constantly, for thoughts, emphasis, titles, letters and whole remembered passages. A slanted roman announces itself every time.
- Real small capitals, if the book uses them. True small caps are drawn at their own weight. Capitals scaled down by software are visibly too light next to the text around them, and the effect is worst in exactly the places small caps belong — a chapter's opening words, an acronym, a section head.
- A character set that covers your book. Accents for names and foreign phrases, an en dash and an em dash of different lengths, real quotation marks, a proper ellipsis. If one accented letter is missing, it is missing in a name that appears two hundred times.
Display faces do not become text faces
A display face is drawn to be looked at once, large. Its personality lives in fine details: a sharp spur, a hairline serif, an exaggerated contrast between thick and thin.
Set the same face at 11 points and those details either vanish or clog. The hairlines drop below what ink and paper can hold, and the sharp joins fill. What was distinctive at 60 points becomes muddy at 11, and you have paid for character you cannot see and legibility you no longer have.
The test is dull but reliable: set two full pages and read them. Not a line, not a heading — two pages.
In the Interior Formatter. Six faces are available for body text — Crimson Text, Gentium Book Plus, Spectral, EB Garamond, Lora and Alegreya — chosen because each holds up at reading size for hundreds of pages, with a true italic. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
A screen face is not automatically a print face
Faces built for interfaces solve a different problem. Screen work is about hinting: making letterforms land cleanly on a grid of pixels at small sizes.
Print has no pixel grid. It has ink, which spreads, and paper, which absorbs unevenly. A face tuned so its stems snap to pixels can print slightly mechanical, and the open, even spacing a screen needs can look loose on a page. "It looks great in my browser" is not evidence about paper.
What each kind of book wants
The conventions are worth following, because readers have absorbed them without being told.
Fiction takes a transitional or old-style serif — the familiar book faces. They are conventional on purpose. A literary novel set in something unexpected reads as a novel with opinions about type.
Nonfiction, workbooks and technical books can carry a sturdier serif, or a humanist sans. Sturdier survives heavy subheads, tables and captions without looking flimsy beside them. A humanist sans — one with calligraphic bones rather than geometric ones — stays readable in long passages in a way a geometric sans does not.
Large print wants generous spacing above everything: open letterforms, loose fit, room between lines. This is a different requirement from simply setting a normal face bigger. See Large Print edition.
The two mistakes that cost money
Licensing. A font you can use on a website is not automatically a font you may embed in a print PDF, and printers reject files whose fonts are not properly embedded. Check the license before you typeset, not after, and never at the proof stage.
Changing faces late. A different face sets to a different page count, because x-height and letter widths change how much text fits on a page. A different page count means a different spine width, which means a new cover. Choose the face before you build the cover, or budget for doing the cover twice.
One face beats three
A book set in one good face, using its real italic and its real small capitals, looks more professional than a book set in three faces. Variety inside a book comes from size, spacing and position — not from a second family.
In the Interior Formatter. Every font it ships is licensed for embedding in commercial print and ebook files, and real small capitals, kerning and ligatures come through in the exported PDF. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Type size, leading and the line that reads well · Back to How to format a book interior · Also: Margins and gutters