GeezerVison

Please note:
BODY TEXT*
is the most com­mon
el­e­ment of a doc­u­ment.
There­fore, how the body
text looks will have the
most no­tice­able ef­fect
on the ap­pear­ance
of the doc­u­ment.
Con­se­quently,
you should
set up the
body text
FIRST.

Start with
font, point size,
line spac­ing, and
line length, be­cause
those four de­ci­sions will
largely de­ter­mine how
the body text will
look. OK?

• Though I’ll stop short of call­ing it a rule, I strongly rec­om­mend us­ing a serif font—not a sans serif font—for body text in print. Most books, news­pa­pers, and mag­a­zines use serif fonts for body text. It’s the tra­di­tional choice and still the best choice.

• On the web, body text can be in a sans serif or serif font. Sans ser­ifs were once pre­ferred for screen text be­cause they ren­dered bet­ter on the lower-res­o­lu­tion screens of the past. (That’s why most graph­i­cal user in­ter­faces are built around sans serif fonts). But on to­day’s screens, serif fonts look equally good.