What are your favorite fonts for technical reports?
I work at a consulting engineering firm and write a lot of reports that are read by the public. I have an opportunity to recommend a different font for all of our written documents and am looking for something more modern/fresh than Times New Roman. Also open to recommendations for purpose specific communities about typography/fonts.
Dyslexie was one of the first fonts I looked at specifically for accessibility purposes. Unfortunately, despite it’s utility, it looks too much like a ‘fun’ font for our documents. Our reports are publicly published for the legal/administrative record, and need to reflect that level of professionalism. :/
Someone else suggested a font that’s helpful for vision impaired people that I will take forward in this process, so maybe I can get a different accessible font through. Really appreciating the thoughtfulness for people with various reading challenges!
Newer research actually says that it mostly doesn’t matter. Use a readable sans or serif, there’s no measurable difference.[1][2][3]
[1] Wery, J.J., Diliberto, J.A. The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Ann. of Dyslexia 67, 114–127 (2017). doi.org/10.1007/s11881-016-0127-1
[2] Kuster, S.M., van Weerdenburg, M., Gompel, M. et al. Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia. Ann. of Dyslexia 68, 25–42 (2018). doi.org/10.1007/s11881-017-0154-6
[3] Rello, L., Baeza-Yates, R. How to present more readable text for people with dyslexia. Univ Access Inf Soc 16, 29–49 (2017). doi.org/10.1007/s10209-015-0438-8
Some of my favorite fonts were designed by Vernon Adams.
He passed away in 2016 but I always remember his fonts. I didn’t know him personally but after using his fonts for years and learning about his passing, l felt very sad. Take a look, you might like some of his fonts.
Thanks for the recs. I thought one of the fonts in the link was called Potato Sans, so now that one is my new personal favorite forever, even if it’s actually called Pontano Sans. :D
IBM’s Plex, I’m particularly partial to their condensed sans.
Fira Sans is a good generic recommendation, their mono is again worth considering.
Adobe’s Source family (sans, serif, mono) is another inoffensive, safe choice.
erewhon is a modern workhorse serif that pairs well with all the sans fonts above. It’s derived from Adobe’s Utopia, which is used in quite a few newspapers (clear and legible without taking too much space).
STIX Two was specifically designed to replace Times New Roman in scientific + mathematical publications, if you’re looking for a font that’s different but familiar to Times New Roman, I could not recommend it enough.
Charis SIL was originally designed for laser printers and later modified for use in linguistics, it’s essentially a serif version of Verdana (same designer too). As with all the other fonts mentioned, very broad character set support.
This is super helpful! Fun fact - Erewhon is also a small chain of very high end markets in Los Angeles. Now I’m going to have to research what this word means and who came up with it first.
Nohwere? It’s an anagram but it’s not straight up backwards for “nowhere”, at least not quite. Presumably it’s named after the novel, which I knew nothing about before five minutes ago in any event.
I usually go with Fira Sans for sans serif, if the document I’m writing isn’t super formal. Mixes well with Inconsolata for code and Latin Modern (or other serif stuff) for math.
It feels like low effort to use the default Office font when there are so many other options, but in my sans serif font tests Calibri ended up looking the best so far. I really didn’t want to like it! Curious where you think serif fonts belong? I don’t know shit about fonts/graphic design…
FYI, the new official Office default is Aptos. I’ve been making work docs with it for a few weeks and I have to admit, it looks really clean and technical.
What counts as print these days though? When I first started working, we’d get literal boxes shipped to us with 1,000+ page documents inside. Now it’s a cloud link that opens with a PDF reader. Does that still count as print? Genuinely curious, because I see conflicting advice depending on if its print or not.
Anything literally printed on paper. If you’re in PDFs and you know your audience is going to be reading it on a small screen, I’d say stay away from the serif fonts. Especially since you mentioned elsewhere that you’re concerned about document length; you can get away with smaller letter tracking size on sans.
I really like me a good serif. Computer (Latin) Modern is very satisfying. Also, according to some research, it’s up there with the Helveticas and the Arials for readability. Note that 12-point is where serifs flourish (figuratively).
Calibri is not actually the default font anymore! In M365, at least. Granted, it will be a long time before it’s not recognized as such.
My company uses Roboto. I like it a lot, but I think it’s gotten pretty popular. Do you know about fonts.google.com? Huge library that you can apply filters to, makes it really easy to browse.
Definitely need to avoid giant fixed-width fonts. My reports often run close to 100 pgs with Times New Roman, and using a typewriter font would blow them up even more. I’ll look into the open source suggestions, thanks!
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