What's you're favorite E-reader fonts?

[Leyor]

I'm thinking about putting together a Sony font package for new users, so it's a bit more easily accessable.

I can see there's alot of confusion, some people think that some popular fonts needs to be paid for, when they actually are free for non commercial use. Others are commercial, but there's free substitutes etc.

I use the default font though So if you have any preferences or suggestions, please list them here. It doesn't matter if it's a commercial one.

[Japes]

I tested many, many, many fonts, and LexiaDama is, to me, the best font out there.

[Ripplinger]

Take a look at this recent thread, which also links to other threads discussing fonts.

My favorite is LexiaDaMa, followed by Verdana. But other common selections are CharisSIL, Fontin, Droid, Lido, ArialMT. It's all subjective which font everyone prefers, people all have their favorites.

[ScalyFreak]

I use the default font on my 950, but if I could pick and choose I have always liked Cambria and Verdana.

[Analogus]

After testing piles of fonts, sticking with Caecilia LT 65 Medium.

Tested Minion Pro, Arial, Fontin, Verdana, Droid, Charis, Times, Garamond, Georgia, Bakerville, Gentium and more.

I clearly prefer serif fonts since they are made for reading large amounts of text.
But most of the serif fonts seems to produce undulating or just varying blackening on the screen which I dislike. Caecilia in comparision is (at least in my eyes) very clear with a perfect distribution of darkness over the screen.

A.

[JSWolf]

When mentioning fonts, would it be possible to at least link to the font so we can get a look at what they look like? Thanks.

[Analogus]

Caecilia LT 65 Medium as you wish ;-)

Not a link but screenshots:





A.

[delphin]

After reading paperbacks for many years, since switching to my Sony, I have been looking for a nice clean, simple, and compact Times style serif font like you would find in those paperbacks.

When paperback publishers are trying to save money on a printing run, they use a slightly bolder, dense, clean version of of a simple times style font that is designed to remain legible, even at the smaller type sizes they use to save paper.

Times New Roman didn't quite cut it for me for several reasons, so I went looking for a font that would mirror this 'paperback' experience as closely as possible.

I found a basic Times style font amongst the freely distributed fonts on my Linux box called Nimbus, and then kept tweaking on it, modifying it's character spacing, weight, and the outlines of some of the characters.

There are probably more than 50 individual changes that I made to the original Nimbus font, some to single letters, some to the full character set.

I have taken a freely distributed public domain title from feedbooks, and modified it's CSS to embed the custom font I created, so you can preview the results without doing any customizations to your reader. (loading this EPUB will do no changes to your readers fonts, just let you see the custom font in this text so you can check it out on your actual readers screen and see how it looks)

Feedbooks uses several separate style sheets, some for the introductory material, and one for the main body text.

I modified ONLY the CSS for the main stories text, which causes all the introductory text about the author Lewis Carol to remain in Sony's original typeface.

When you get to the actual main text of the story (which uses the 'body' CSS tag) you will see it in my custom 'NimbusMod' typeface.

REMEMBER -

FOR COMPARISON PURPOSES, THE "About Carrol" SECTION IS STILL IN SONY'S ORIGINAL FONT.

ONLY THE MAIN TEXT OF THE ACTUAL STORY IS IN MY NEW CUSTOM 'NimbusMod' FONT.

Through the Looking Glass (Story Text In NimbusMod font).epub


Check it out and let me know how it looks on your Sony. On mine, I think that the difference in readability, especially at the smaller font sizes, is pretty dramatic.

[Analogus]

Your font is in on the testing lane...

Left: Caecilia, right: NimbusMod


Looks very pleasant so far. Regular blackening. I'll give it a try for a couple of days.

Thanks so far

A.

[RajS]

I like the one on the right. Well done!!

[Leyor]

Keep the suggestions coming (If you actually have a link to the font aswell, it'll radically cut down on the time I have to work on this too hehe )

[delphin]

Originally Posted by Leyor

Keep the suggestions coming (If you actually have a link to the font aswell, it'll radically cut down on the time I have to work on this too hehe )

Obviously, my NimbusMod can be found embedded into the above epub so you can just download the epub, rename it to Nimbus.zip and unzip it and then look inside the OPS folder for the 'fonts' folder and you will find.

NimbusMod.ttf -- is the regular standard weight font.

NimbusMod_I.ttf -- is the italic standard weight font.

I didn't create bold versions of this font for the Sony, because the built in Sony font rendering will take care of creating a bolded version if you don't supply one, and in this case, it's algorithm does a really nice job, so there is no reason to install or embed a bold version.

[catsknit]

I've only modified a font once, following directions I found in another thread somewhere, just to try it. But don't you have to change it for each book individually, or is there a way to have Calibre make that change on any book you convert to epub?
thanks
p.s. I do like your modified Nimbus

[Ripplinger]

You can let Calibre convert every book to your desired font by adding in the css info and having the fonts on your reader in a directory. You might run into a few books that have embedded fonts where there's a bit more to it though where you'll also have to remove the embedded fonts.

It does start getting tedious though to have to convert every book, so the much easier way is to install PRS+ and then the reader will use the font you want all the time.

[kacir]

I will only talk about fonts that are freely available.

Lexia DaMa is very, very similar to Caecilia.
I have used Corel Draw! and I have made samples of identical text in both fonts. I have made both semi-transparent (with diffenent colors) and I have put one text on another to compare them. The difference is *very* small. What distinguishes *Kindle version* of Caecilia 55 from other fonts is that Kindle version has hand-tweaked bitmaps embedded in font for certain sizes.
Lexia is free, Caecilia is expensive, commercial font.

My long time favourites are Gentium, Gentium Book basic, and Ubuntu font family http://font.ubuntu.com/

Many people here like Fontin.

There are also many decent fonts that are available for various Linux distributions, because fonts distributed with Windows are in fact proprietary and non-redistributable.
Fonts used as base fonts in Linux distributions are: dejavu fonts, linux libertine, droid (paid for by Google for their Android project), and others. Just have a look at Ubuntu Linux repositories.