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KP,

Are you making your PDFs from your Word document? I'd import first into InDesign, and make them from there. Type is handled differently with a graphic design tool (InDesign) than it is with a general office tool (Word) and the appearance will be different in a number of ways, such as how the type is spaced, kerned and leaded.

Palatino should be OK in small sizes, although it is not the most readable at sizes below, say, 7 or 8 pt. But certainly Minion or Adobe Garamond or similar should be fine for general text. There's a number of very good choices that come bundled with CS software. And a 10.5 pt size is generally OK for readability. But it should have some leading. For long text, I'd like to see 10.5/12 or 10.5/13 as minimum leading. I also keep the column widths to 50-75 characters wide, again for readability and appearance.

And stay away from "free" or super-cheap fonts. They tend to be poorly crafted knockoffs, badly designed "originals", can often cause problems at output time, and there may be legal issues (font piracy) involved in their distribution. For example, outside of included fonts with Adobe software, Adobe's fonts are generally not legally available for free distribution.

Neil