December 15, 2008

Judy Safran-Aasen & John D. Berry

Two of Microsoft's top typography experts offer examples that will help you make your text as readable as it can be.

Ever wonder why some text seems easier to read than others? A few basic formatting changes can make reading text much easier. Factors like line spacing, font choice, font size and margins are key to legibility.

Let's look at an example. Here's a default paragraph of 12pt Times New Roman, spread across the full width of the page, with no extra space between lines.

It looks familiar, but how easy is it to read? Times New Roman was originally designed for newspapers, where the columns were narrow and the lines were always quite short. The lines here look awfully long. Will it help if we make them shorter? Sure, it won't cram as many words on the page, but what's there might be a lot easier to read.

Here is the same paragraph, reformatted in several ways. Everything but the indent is standard in Office Word 2007. The new font is Calibri, the new default text size is 11pt, and the new default line spacing is 1.15 (115% of the font size), which is a little more space than in earlier versions of Word. We've used a paragraph indent to make the lines considerably shorter, too.

In Office 2007, the new default font is Calibri, a typeface that was designed with current technology in mind. Calibri is a sans serif typeface with clean, open forms and rounded stroke ends. Despite the usual rule of thumb that serif typefaces are easier to read in text than sans serif, Calibri is comfortably readable both on screen and on paper. It looks a little bigger than Times New Roman, so the default size in Word is now 11pt, rather than 12pt.

Easier to read? You be the judge. Don't rely on our screen captures of the results; try it out yourself.

Here's what we did.

First we increased the space between lines from "1" (the same as the font size, in this case 12 pts) to 1.15 (115% of the font size — the default line spacing in Word 2007). It's not a big difference, but this extra space makes it easier to read along the line without our eyes straying to the line below or above. We did this by clicking the Line Spacing button, in the Paragraph group on the Home tab in the ribbon, and choosing 1.15. (If we wanted to choose a different amount of space from what's shown in the menu, we'd click Line Spacing Options…, to open the Paragraph dialog box, and enter a number in the At: edit box under Line Spacing.)

Next we made the lines shorter by indenting the whole paragraph — in this case, two inches from the left. (You could achieve the same effect by changing the page margins, if you wanted to affect everything on the page.) Now our lines are 4½ inches long, instead of 6½ inches. You can do this by clicking the Increase Indent button in the Paragraph group on the Home tab, or by opening the Paragraph dialog box.

Finally, we changed the font from Times New Roman to Calibri, and the font size from 12pt to 11pt. Both of those choices can be found in the Font group on the Home tab, as well as In the Font dialog box.

That's it.

The same principle of shorter lines, a readable font, and a little extra space works in PowerPoint, too. Sometimes presenting less information at once but making it easier to read also makes it easier — and faster — to absorb and use.

About the authors

Judy Safran-Aasen is a Program Manager in the Microsoft Typography group. The Typography group is part of Windows International and provides fonts and related expertise for all Microsoft products. In her spare time, Judy contemplates work/life balance, closet organizers and more effective strategies for herding cats. She enjoys sports (playing and watching) with her family and travelling to exotic ports of call.

John D. Berry is a Program Manager in Microsoft Typography. He is President of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) and former editor of U&lc (Upper & lower case). He wrote and designed Now Read This: the Microsoft ClearType font collection. In 1984-85, he worked as a typographer at Microsoft Press; he's back at Microsoft after a mere 23 years.”