Typefacing reality

From the dawn of "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) personal computer word processing -- which happened when I was about eight -- I've had a bit of a fascination with typefaces and printing. For example, my idea of a "useful and fun" publishing program is Adobe Pagemaker, which I discovered in college. Unfortunately, I can't buy it for myself, since good old Adobe offers it for $500, which might best be described as "stratospheric" pricing compared to what I can afford to pay for, well, anything at the moment.

For nearly as long as I've been producing printed documents myself, which began rather more recently than the WYSIWYG revolution (remember when that was a revolution?), I have disliked the default fonts so often provided on computers. Now, I'm not a user of "fancy fonts." I'm just picky about fonts and layout, and I've never been able to explain just why or how that is. All of my work in college was in Palatino, or occasionally in the Computer Roman default output by the LaTeX typesetting package on UNIX (which, incidentally, is not at all WYSIWYG).

When I got to law school and stepped into what seemed like a land of conformity, I began using what everyone else seemed to expect-- Times New Roman. Well, almost everyone. Some people who miss the old days of documents typed with mechanical typewriters used variations on the Courier font. Slow and deep within me brewed a discontent with Times New Roman that only my loathing for Courier surpassed.

Now comes to the rescue the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Yes, really. By way of Howard Bashman's "A Concise Guide to Writing Better Appellate Briefs" I discovered Part XXII of the Seventh's Circuit's "Practitioner's Handbook for Appeals," titled "XXII. Requirements and Suggestions for Typography in Briefs and Other Papers." (The latter link is to a PDF, printed separately.) In these six pages lie several useful gems, including my favorite-- admonitions to abandon the use of Times New Roman for legal documents:

The court goes on to describe some good fonts and what to look for in fonts. Like many Seventh Circuit opinions, this six-page document explains the technical details of its topic in an accessible manner. The guide points out how little choices that seemed automatic to the writer of a brief or other document affect the reader. Someone spent some time talking to the court's printer, and it was time well spent. Check it out.

This prompts the question, "where can I find these fonts they're talking about?" Once again I find myself without enough money to indulge. Adobe will happily sell you its rendition of all four forms of New Century Schoolbook for $95.99 US. AGFA Monotype will sell you its version for $79.20. Bitstream offers its variation for $99.00.

Ouch! What's someone like me to do? In my case, I've got a CD-ROM of Corel Office 9 that I bought a few years back that I seem to recall has variants on some of these fonts (by Bitstream, I think) on it. I'm going to see what I can find on there.

I wonder what the Tenth Circuit has to say about this.