Typophile

Good body text for PDF online

Sebastian Villalonga

Hi guys,
I am design a weekly newsletter with the utter classical combination of Helvetica Neue for titles and Adobe Garamond Pro, for body text.

Most of the people receive the PDF and read it online. Most of the readers are 50/60 years old psychologists, philosophers or social studies related professions. So i wonder if 12 pt/14 pt leading, for reading from a screen is to consider big/clear enough. Most text are many pages long.

Besides that, i would like to know what other font would you recommend for reading large texts on a PDF from a computer screen? Is the 12 pt ok? Lines are 80 characters long. Here is an example by the way.

Thanks for any info!

Cheers,

vilbel

I think 12 is ok, it looks better anyway. Readers can always fit the page to the width of their screen, if they like.

I'm by no means an expert, but wouldn't a sans serif font work better for screen reading purposes?

Sebastian Villalonga

hi vilbel, thanks for the suggestion. Regarding San Serif or Serif for screen reading is something i am not quite clear either. Some website for example have great samples of Serif font like

http://www.newyorker.com/

but other has done quite good with Sans Serif like
http://www.bbc.co.uk/

Cheers,
S

AdamC

I prefer to read Sans Serif when it's the body text. It's easier on my eyes, especially above 12 pt font. If you can, try and see if you can do a few tests with both a serif and san serif font with users.

Sebastian Villalonga

hi adamC, thanks for the suggestion. I will test it and see what happens.

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