Which other fonts you have installed in your knowledge machine?
Ain't funny? "Knowledge machine" is the literally translation
of the Finnish (Suomea) word for "computer," "tietokone."
AS

Have you looked at Lido at Storm Type? It's probably the best free font I've seen out there.

In the free crowd, Georgia stands out.

But give us some details about your dissertation, especially:
1) How much text you have.
2) What it's about.

hhp

>But give us some details about your dissertation,<

Also, is there a lot of statistical information, tables, charts & graphs

It's a computer science dissertation - couple hundred pages, in chapters, sections and sub-sections, with occasional box-and-arrows diagrams. Unfortunately, the school requires a 12pt font and double-spaced lines (!!!). So columns are probably out - it's just going to be wide and sparse lines of text filling a standard A4/letter page.

My current fonts are what came with Windows and Office, including Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, etc. Right now I've been experimenting with Book Antiqua (thanks for the textism link BTW, it's very inspiring!), which looks fairly nice. It's got low x-height, though, which makes the long, double-spaced lines look funny.

By the way, thanks for the Lido link - I'll definitely give it a try!

If the school requires not just 12 point type and double spacing but also a fixed margin (as I recall one inch was usually the magic number) your main problem might be line length -- you might be getting too many characters per line. You might want to look for a wide face if that's the case (and, yes, a larger x-height because of the big line space).

The terms 12 point and double line space are meaningless. 10 different fonts rendered at "12 point" could appear as 10 different sizes. Lines space will also be affected by the various font ascent and descent values.

Gentium, by Victor Gaultney, is very much worth a look:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium

Lookie here. Seems timely. http://www.textism.com/textfaces/

I forgot about Gentium, very good call David.