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Not one of the experts around here, but I imagine Minion Pro which comes with CS2 would be an appropriate choice for the use - not sure on the style though as this relates more to subject matter, audience, branding etc. Minion does seem to set into a smaller space then Palatino

Have you tried decreasing the leading and maybe a wee bit of negative tracking in your paragraph style? Though this will 'darken' the page colour.

Also coming from Word you may be adding an empty line between paragraphs, this is a bit of a no-no and you should use the "Space after paragraph" value to add a bit of space but not a full line - this will also save some pages, but again will 'darken' the page.

Hope this helps give you some things to look into, and I'm sure you'll get some more advice from the more experienced people here shortly.

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

Palatino is a fine font for book work, and 10.5 point is an acceptable size. But I suspect that you are setting on too wide a measure, and that is making the work hard to read. Normally, a book on 8.5x11 paper should have one wide margin, with perhaps 30 to 36 picas of text width.

This will make the book longer in page count, but you can use up some of the marginal space for illustrations, headings (especially side headings), and other marginalia.

Drop into a bookstore and take a look at some of the larger format books. The are usually professionally designed and will give you good ideas.

(If you really need to cram it into a short page count, go to a two column format.)

Hello again all.

Thanks very much for your responses. The book is technical in nature, and I want to adopt a modern textbook style.

Unit Seven, I will watch out for the formatting that Word might add; Mr Keller's advice about the importing and leading should come in very handy here.

By the way, I have a textbook, ISBN 0131914359, Organizational Behavior by Stephen Robbins. This book is in the format that Mr. Cahill mentioned, with one wide margin. Can anyone tell me what this font is or how I might find out?

Thanks again for all your help.

KP

      Can anyone tell me what this font is or how I might find out?




Not really, without seeing the book. I note that Amazon does not have a see inside feature. The cover font looks like Avant Garde, but that means nothing about the inside design.

I did a little sleuthing, and found that the 12 edition of that book uses ITC New Baskerville in the appendicies. That is no guarantee that the 11th edition (the one you gave the ISBN for) is the same.

(If you want to check, take a look at the italics. The p in particular is very distinctive, and the s, y and e shapes will confirm it. You can get samples of the font online in several places, like myfont.com and adobe.com, and some allow you to set the font large enough to compare.)

Thanks for your reply Mr. McCahill. I will do the research.

Have a look at the title verso (the flipside of the title page). If you're lucky, the name of the font used will be listed there.

Or there might be a colophon at the very back of the book that would include the typographic information.

Neil