Things Editors Think About
Making my peace with Times
01/July/2009 02:57 PM
When I first read text formatted in Times, I had a
visceral reaction against this font. Times, to my
eye, was tiny and hard to read; it was fussy. It
brought to my mind the
image of long, gray columns of thickly set (and
dry) facts. I much preferred another serif font,
Palatino, which seemed much more readable and
elegant. In fact, I still like Palatino for my own
writing and correspondence.
But I’ve learned to love Times and Times New Roman, especially for editing. Once I either increase the point size to 14 or zoom higher than 100 percent, Times offers many advantages. For one thing, the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash are truly different in size. There’s no way I could accidentally let an en dash stand for an em dash to set off a phrase in a sentence. Nor would I ever let an em dash instead of an en dash separate spans of numbers. With Times, I can quickly catch any en dash trying to impersonate a hyphen in compound phrases like small-business owners.
In addition, the punctuation in Times is distinctly shaped, very curvy, especially commas and quotation marks. Opening quotation marks look like 66; closing ones look like 99. It’s easy to make sure a single opening quotation mark (shaped like a 6) doesn’t try to play the role of an apostrophe (shaped like a 9).
In Times, italicized commas and semicolons are also clearly different from their roman counterparts. In other fonts, I often have to check the toolbar in Word to see if the mark has been formatted as italic.
Even now that I do most of my editing in tracked changes right on the computer, I still prefer to use Times or Times New Roman, despite early (now questioned) studies claiming that sans serif fonts, like Helvetica or Lucida Grande, are easier to read on a computer monitor. The distinct shapes of Times punctuation are just easier for me to see and correct as needed. Times helps me be more efficient, and that can only help my clients.
What if my client hates the look of Times? Once my editing is complete, it takes only a moment to reformat the text in a different font.
But I’ve learned to love Times and Times New Roman, especially for editing. Once I either increase the point size to 14 or zoom higher than 100 percent, Times offers many advantages. For one thing, the hyphen, the en dash, and the em dash are truly different in size. There’s no way I could accidentally let an en dash stand for an em dash to set off a phrase in a sentence. Nor would I ever let an em dash instead of an en dash separate spans of numbers. With Times, I can quickly catch any en dash trying to impersonate a hyphen in compound phrases like small-business owners.
In addition, the punctuation in Times is distinctly shaped, very curvy, especially commas and quotation marks. Opening quotation marks look like 66; closing ones look like 99. It’s easy to make sure a single opening quotation mark (shaped like a 6) doesn’t try to play the role of an apostrophe (shaped like a 9).
In Times, italicized commas and semicolons are also clearly different from their roman counterparts. In other fonts, I often have to check the toolbar in Word to see if the mark has been formatted as italic.
Even now that I do most of my editing in tracked changes right on the computer, I still prefer to use Times or Times New Roman, despite early (now questioned) studies claiming that sans serif fonts, like Helvetica or Lucida Grande, are easier to read on a computer monitor. The distinct shapes of Times punctuation are just easier for me to see and correct as needed. Times helps me be more efficient, and that can only help my clients.
What if my client hates the look of Times? Once my editing is complete, it takes only a moment to reformat the text in a different font.
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