Hi! I work a bit with type but not in type buying, so I have a bit of a dilemma. I do some freelance teaching work in my spare time. I have a tax credit because of that and am thinking about buying a nice body text font for my own teaching work-lesson plans and the like-that’s got more range than Garamond.

I have a couple of criteria I’m looking for, in descending order of importance. No choice about foundry-in fact I’d be keen to support a small one doing something really good.

1. Budget: not more than $200 for the family unless it’s something amazing. One-computer license, no web use envisaged.
2. Old-style font would be my preference; something less hard than a Times. Should be very friendly and readable.
3. I’d really like something that plays nice with Word and apps that don’t understand OpenType. Separate small caps fonts would be extremely helpful.
4. Ideally reasonably tight linespacing.
5. Optical caption/titling variants would be nice too.
6. Bold style that’s clearly bold but not too thick. Needs to not stand out against quite small headings.
7. Swash option would be nice, again ideally as a separate font.
8. Needs lining figures for maths.

Any thoughts?