New Century Schoolbook is the One True Font! 60 kB .gifs.

I find Times New Roman to be quite character-less (but I'm fairly sure Peter will disagree on that score). New Century Schoolbook has some character, and that Ecomonist font has loads. Goudy Old Style has a distinct personality, as does Bookman Old Style. Microsoft used to distribute a font called Footlight which also has a distinct personality. I found it was a good default seriffed font for web pages.

Well, that's why I prefer Times New Roman for standard documents, things people might read, such as my monthly letters. It's easy to read, it isn't "fancy" and it doesn't detract from what they are reading. Not having "character" to distinguish it, makes it a good everyday use font.

And maybe it's habit, or what I'm used to, but when I switched to the Opera browser, it started putting everything in Arial and man, it looked weird. I like things I'm used to, so I guess I decided that it was the best thing for regular stuff, like my To Do lists and letters and such. I pretty much use it for all standard documents in a 12 font or 10 font.

Note: I did go into MS Word and look for New Century Schoolbook, but it isn't there. They have something called Old Century, but MAN it comes up dark in a 12 font, compared to the Times New Roman. Compared next to each other, they look entirely different, and when you bold Old Century, it all blurs at 12 point.

Now, when making signs or posters or things with "character" I choose a font that fits, such as an old fashioned cursive with a religious sign, or a rustic looking font for say, the family reunion. And when making such "fancy" things, I usually use Print Shop, and I really like the Cuckoo font and the Christie font. They are pretty neat.

So I'll probably stick with Times New Roman for basic things, simply because I'm used to it. It's also easy to space out and write things above and below (I do that with lyrics and music notes sometimes).

Nightowl >8#

Caslon's way nicer than either. So is Garamond, Centaur, and a host of others. Poetica by Adobe is based on Arrighi, a renaissance italic font, and makes a nice complement to Centaur (which is also based on a renaissance font, but it doesn't have an italic version, only a roman version).

If you like newer fonts, the Stone (roman, italic, sans, semisans, and serif) series is pretty nice, as is Bembo, Gill Sans, and Minion. Minion also has the advantage of coming in Cyrillic along with a bunch of other varieties; a very complete line when compared to a classic font like Centaur. What else do I like... Rotis is really nice too.

Most of the fonts that you get when you buy those CDs are utter crap, though.

Times New Roman was specifically designed for newspapers, and even more specifically to be legible on cheap crappy newsprint, where fun things like runout of the ink happens (ie- when the ink spreads out after landing on the paper in those oh-so-nice little tendrils along the paper fibres). In short, it was specifically designed not to look nice but to explicitly deal with the limitations of the medium it was to be printed on... being designed for the Times of London a century or so back.

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