Fonts and spaces

A recent question in a newsgroup had its own answer:

Why do people prefer indented single-spaced paragraphs with two spaces after the period and a 12pt Times New Roman font? I suspect it's because Newspapers have been printing text that way almost since Guttenburg... and people hate to change.

Indented paras with no space between, yes, but two spaces after a period? Only in very amateurish newspapers which do not realize that in most fonts the extra space is built in with the actual dot at the left hand end of the glyph. Spacing between paragraphs is quite common in newspapers when text is set ragged right, either as a style or for special features. And paragraph spacing is a common ploy to make stories fit. And Times? Great font for papers printed on very high quality newsprint. Most newspapers have used more suitable fonts even from before Times New Roman was designed. Morison created that in 1932 for a specific use and it got out of hand when it was built in to most of the early laserprinters. "The Times" has not used it for decades. I made the point in an article usually titled Face it - your body matters" which has been published in a number of publications for newspaper and periodical publishers. Here's an extract:

I asked a number of typographers for their recommendations for a newspaper font, to be printed on standard newsprint. Six came up with nine recommendations. I'll list them all in no particular order: Nimrod, Olympian, Rotation, Times Europa, Calisto, Melior, Stone, Lucida and Lino Letter. While some are categorised as serif fonts, others are classified by the foundries as "slab serif". All have most aspects in common - wideset, with good variation between thick and thin strokes, but with no fine strokes, large bowls to letters such as e and a and relatively large x-height. X-height is the height of lowercase characters such as x which have no descenders or ascenders.

The same principles apply if you are using a low cost book paper, especially those which are intended to bulk-up a book. Different font choices would apply if you are producing text on coated stock. People in general don't know they are seeing bad or good typographic choices -- they just stop reading if the task is made unnecessarily difficult. Those choices are partially conditioned by experience and by fashion but also by more direct influences such as the ease with which the eye can take in the information.