I'd like to suggest Arno Pro for the body copy and Meta for the headlines. I hope they're useful for you.

BTW, the thesis sounds nice. I'm a fan of open source movement. :-)

JamesZ

"a good body/heading combination of fonts to me that would suit well the theme that I’ve described (if it makes any difference that is)."

Just an idea – how about porting the open source issue over to your design, i.e. resorting to open source fonts only? One former fellow student of mine did that – her thesis focused (inter alia) on collaborative design / content generation and public domain stuff, so she ended up setting the thing in Linux Libertine. It wasn't perfect in terms of looking super-sleek and "designed", but it was a statement that was true to the content.
Unfortunately I myself don't know enough about the OS font scene to make any cogent suggestions. Except you might look at Gentium for text.

"I’m not even sure if there is a rule of using serifs for headings and sans for bodies, or vice versa"

Most of the good text fonts are seriffed. For headings, you have more liberties.

Take Andron. Looks best, reads best.

Thank you for the quick response!
Very nice. I like the idea of using open source fonts. I simply couldn't find a pro looking one yet.
Andron and Gentium look great. The only thing that stops me is that they look rather tradition. I thought that maybe I could find a modern serif font.
But then again, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

I was also going to mention Arno Pro.

Arno Pro Light display, or Caption. I'm printing at 11 points

For 11 pts I would just use the Regular version. And SmText for really small points (like footnotes and such). Caption and Display are usually for larger pointsizes.

According to Adobe, Arno Pro Caption is the cut intended for footnotes and other stuff set at 8.4 pts or less. SmText is the one in between Caption and Regular (8.5 to 10.9 pts).

That said, I find it odd that Gentium is too traditional but Arno isn't?

Thank you archaica.
The way i understand it, all of the above serifs are rather medeaval looking. I may be wrong, but by reading about them my suppositions are confirmed.
Constantia to me looks most modern -- may be because of its angularity. But I'm not sure about it printing as a body.

Have you tried printing with Arno? It's a great text face, and has a nice color. But since you seem to be looking for something else, you could try Chaparral. It's a slab serif though, and it might look quite friendly. Or perhaps Warnock? They're usually packed with Adobe Creative Suites, so if you have InDesign or Photoshop, you'll probably have those that I mentioned.

I haven't seen DejaVu Serif in print, nor Liberation Serif, but they're free. I think they also come with Fedora? Museo Sans could also be a viable header. Delicious kinda looks bad in print, though.

Adobe InDesign doesn't compare to OOo or Word; it's great. You can even just load in the text from a source file. You can also access extra glyphs from your fonts (for example, Fertigo's F insignia, or Diavlo's little devil).

But, of course, OOo will usually suffice for papers. :)

> According to Adobe, Arno Pro Caption is the cut intended for footnotes and other stuff set at 8.4 pts or less. SmText is the one in between Caption and Regular (8.5 to 10.9 pts).

Ok, my mistake. Even the Regular works well at small sizes, but its good that there are size specific cuts available.

> That said, I find it odd that Gentium is too traditional but Arno isn’t?

yes, that's kinda odd. ;) Arno is of course a very traditional rennaissance like typeface. But I think it has enough contemporary features to make it very usable. I've set a poetrybook with it a while back, and it works beautifully.

Do you need italics? bold? small caps?

Unfortunately all cuts but the "Arno Pro Regular" show up in my OOo. No luck. Display looks thin. But maybe that is alright. Gonna have to test it out.

What is the mood like in the Type-community regarding the new(2004) Microsoft serifs Cambria Constantia?

>> Do you need italics? bold? small caps?
Yes

That Regular is missing from your Arno Pro is quite odd. I think it comes with Adobe CS3, so maybe check the CD's or something?

i had to convert Arno Pro into ttf (legitimacy of which i'm not sure about, although i think license allows this, and this is a personal use) to use on OOo on my linux partition, as it does not accept OTF over there. I guess this is a whole other issue.

What distribution are you using? I use OTF fonts on Ubuntu 8.04 and Slackware 12.2 just fine. Just put them in /usr/share/fonts/OTF and run fc-cache. You might have to make the "OTF" folder.

What is the mood like in the Type-community regarding the new(2004) Microsoft serifs Cambria Constantia?

Constantia is nice; perhaps the irony of using a Microsoft typeface for a discussion of open source would add something extra as well :) Cambria may be a bit narrow for a thesis.

Glen>
I am using Ubuntu 8.10.
I tried the /usr/share/fonts/OTF trick, and the fonts show up anywhere but OOo

Ah OK. I just read that Open Office doesn't support it yet (as you stated). However, they are hoping to fix it in the next version which is supposed to be released on April 23 at the earliest. No guarantees with that though...

Is there anything very similar to Arno Pro?

Since you're running a Word Processor with limited typographical capabilities, my suggestion would be to use a typeface that doesn't require ligatures. Also, since theses are usually required to be set at twelve points with ungainly wide textblocks, and you're probably not going to print at higher than 600pdi, you'd want something fairly sturdy looking. Constantia will work well under these circumstances, even without being able to use its more advanced features in OOo.

If you have Arno, then you either have Adobe CS3 or you some version of Adobe FontFolio. If you have CS, your thesis would benefit greatly from using it (provided you know how to use it!). I am presently typesetting my thesis in InDesign with Arno Pro, and it is possible to get a very good result this way. Chaparral and Warnock would also suit your project well if you were using CS.

nepenthe >
thank you for this exhausting answer.
You nailed it.
I do have cs3 and would possibly use inDesign to type set eventually, now when you mention it. However I've been working with Open Office 3 all this time so I will see if this transition will be painless. Otherwise i will have to use LyX.
Would simply substituting all the ligatures in OOo get a half decent result?

>> Would simply substituting all the ligatures in OOo get a half decent result?
Unfortunatley, no. In OOo you still can't use proper superscript numerals for footnotes, and the hyphenation and justification in Open Office is poor, to name just two reasons. You'd be better off setting the text ragged right with no hyphenation.

LyX (LaTeX) will give you very good results, too. But importing a long document into tex format might not be quite seamless. I've never tried it. Depending on when your deadline is, I could help you set up your templates in CS to get things working well. After Wednesday, I would have time to help you with this.

Keep in mind that if you didn't use styles consistently in your OpenOffice doc, much work will be involved in adapting it in InDesign. Depending on your time constraints, this is definitely a factor to consider.

nepenthe >
To the best of my knowledge I've applied all the styles correctly.
I'm submitting my thesis for review on the 16th but my defense is only on the 28th and the printing is possibly even later. I have some time. The review copy does not have to be anything but readable/legible.
It would amazing if you could help my with inDesign setup.

is Scribus 1.3.5 any good?