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Originally Posted by ath
I'm not sure it is useful to ask users for 'best suited font' unless they have fairly extensive experience with material using those *exact* fonts. The pages you link to also suggest that these are *not* original fonts, but clones: Not Palatino but URW Palladio, not Times but Nimbus, etc. Is that correct? Be honest with your voters: use the real typeface names. Make sure blame as well as praise reaches the right source.
It may be better to approach the question from the other 'side': what typefaces were designed as good all-round text faces? Look for old-style numerals and small caps: those tend to be fairly reliable indicators. Also look for high x-height, and distinctive letter shapes. (AvantGarde is originally a logo typeface, and the added lower-case does very little to make it suitable for sustained reading -- you should not even consider using that one.)
For this particular application (medium resolution), also look for clear design, and absence of small details that won't get right unless you actually print the text on paper.
Another approach is to ask 'do these typefaces support all glyphs that are required?' Not all users can answer this, as they don't know what should be in the text. It's embarrassing to select a typeface for its beauty and then discover that it can't do breve accents in texts that require them.
Once you have work-horses that will do the job, you may ask about how pretty they are, or how any bystanders like their colour.
I would suggest Charter or Palatino as the primary typefaces. Note: the real versions -- I have no experience with clones: they may be all messed up or lack the necessary glyphs for all I know. The sample pages I see suggest typeface spacing is out of whack, but that may be a side-effect from the lines being so excessively stretched due to absence of hyphenation. Might also be a misconfiguration ... if you use LaTeX, make sure words don't get s t r e t c h e d out: that damages readability. And any word space stretched to a point where it is wider than line-spacing also kills readability: ragged-right may be preferrable.
(no, I have not voted for any typeface)
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I used the name that LaTeX used for these fonts, and don't have a single clue if there's some other names for those. There's always copyright issues for embedded font, guess that's the reason why they're using clones. With both a link to those fonts page and a sample file, I believe I'm honest enough: everyone can easily see what those fonts look like.
As for hyphenation, it is used in the sample text. Only problem with hyphenation is that you have to set a pretty high tolerance value, or else, you'll be missing some words (Overfull hbox + some words disappearing in the right margin). No real solution for this yet, I'll try the microtype package, it might help.
This is not really much of a problem with A4 and the iLiad, but it happens a lot on the PRS-500 because of the smaller size of the screen (which means that you have to increase the tolerance value, but that's still a lot better than the flowing for RTF/LRF since there's hyphenation).
These fonts should support all the character needed for fiction works. I agree that small type is a pretty good indicator, that's why for each font there's a page with in font in size 10 to 16.
Oh and I believe that such a poll IS useful, we're letting the users select what suit them the best: those looking for another font can still customize their PDF and use another of these fonts.