"Best" fonts/font sizes?

[AceHarddrive]

Hello all!

What do you consider the "best" fonts and font sizes for reading on handheld devices, such as my Tapwave Zodiac 2?

Thanks all!
~Tim ^_^

[kacir]

well... , it very much depends on the device, look of fonts on the particular screen, aviability of fonts and such things.
Generally I find sans-serif (like Arial, Helvetica or Swiss) to be much more readable on a low resolution screen. Low resolution means less than 200dpi - that is vast majority of existing devices.
You should try to use built-in fonts in your device, because those might be optimized for that particular screen.

Just grab a book and format it using several fonts, fontsizes, bold or nobold atributes until you find the solution you like the best. You should try to read several screenfuls of text with each combination of fonts / sizes / margins / justifications / ...

Spending several hours choosing the best combination is well worth your time. You might spend hundreds of hours looking at the combination ;-)

Also ...
For a small screen i personally do not like justified text - small screen makes lines too short and text can become quite uneven. The most ordinary "left justified" text works the best.

[ofsahin]

as far as i know Verdana is the one most suitable to eyes, however, it depends the device that you read on.

and after googleing i found one article about this

http://www.poynter.org/content/conte...w.asp?id=78569

and there is another thread in this forum

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2848

bye bye

[JSWolf]

On the Sony Reader, and I use Book Designer, I prefer to use 11point for the paragraphs font size. I try to get close to that when using Libprs500 to do any conversions.

[pruss]

I use Utopia 16, antialiased, for most of my ebook reading. (Either via FontSmoother or via Plucker's native antialiased font support.) It's a Bible-style font, i.e., it has short ascenders and descenders, which lets it pack more lines in a given vertical extent without sacrificing readability.

[RWood]

If size of character is not important, I like New Century Schoolbook. It is a serif font that is very easy to read since it is so open. It also has a low letter count per inch vs. Times or Ariel (which is also a lower count that Times.) The hardest font for me to read is Baskerville (or New Baskerville) since after a few minutes my eyes start to hurt. Generally I find that a serif font is easier to read for me than a san serif.

For size I tend to ~11 pt for the body copy on the Sony Reader. I use the built in Dutch (Times) font for body copy and Swiss (Helv or Ariel) for titles.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by AceHarddrive

Hello all!

What do you consider the "best" fonts and font sizes for reading on handheld devices, such as my Tapwave Zodiac 2?

Thanks all!
~Tim ^_^

On my Zodiac 2, I use the old freeware version of FonthackV, with the Zodiac compatible 2.39 beta of Igor Nesterov's YAHM for OS5 as the hack manager. For the default font for all applications on the Zodiac, I use 22pt HandEra Thin and Thick (provided with Fonthack) for standard and bold face, and the built in system fonts for Large, Large Bold, and symbol.

My usual ebook reader is Plucker, which supports custom fonts under OS5. For that, I use Bitstream+FreeMono 14pt, with a single space leading. For the Library list, I use the same font in a smaller 12pt version. Since I have an assortment of technical documentation that includes codes snippets as well as fiction and other works, a font that includes a mono-spaced face for the code fragments works well. (The versions I have were converted by Plucker Dev David Desrosiers, but I don't have a link for them at hand.)

I've been a designer/production guy for print stuff, and I'm a contrarian. The usual assumption is that serif fonts are inherently more readable. I disagree. I think a sans-serif can work fine for body copy, assuming you choose a good font to begin with, and pay attention to leading, kerning, and measure. (Setting body copy is an art a lot of folks who make their living as designers don't seem to have mastered.)

On the Zodiac, at least, sans-serif faces work better for me than serif fonts.

One of the things I've been playing with in the background is font conversion for the PDA. I have iSilo-X desktop installed here. iSilo-X desktop can take True Type fonts and convert them to a format usable by the iSilo viewer on the PDA. As it happens, I don't use iSilo. But Alex Pruss released a freeware utility called Font Collector that resides on the PDA, and can convert the isilo fonts to other formats, including FonthackV, Fonts4OS5, and his own Font Smoother. Unless you run something like MSMount (which makes files in a directory on a card appear to be in RAM), fonts normally have to live in RAM on a PalmOS device, so there's a limit to how many you may wish to have handy, but there's lots of room for experimentation. (MSMount, alas, does not run on the Zodiac.)

FonthackV is here: http://trials.palmgear.com/dl2.php/5...HackV_1.03.zip

YAHM for OS5 is here: http://yahm.palmoid com

Font Collector is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmfontconv/
______
Dennis

[Lemurion]

I don't use a Zodiac, but find with uBook, my best choice is TNR at the second smallest setting. I can't read most sans serif fonts for any real length of time.