10pt or 12pt fonts?

[uv23]

I've noticed discrepancies betweeen WOTC products and d20 products. Where WOTC uses a 10pt font, d20 publishers seem to use a 12pt, giving the impression that they're larger than they are. Any thoughts on this? Is there an industry standard?

 

[crunchy_d20_bits]

10 pt?

Depends on the book...

Aren't the core rulebooks even smaller than 10pt? (8 pt?)

And some of the other D20 third-party books are running higher than 12pt (which is huge).

The on-line publishers are REALLY bad for this - most of them are running with WAY lower text-density than the print publishers. There are a few good examples of 30 page products puffed up to 50 pages - I won't start pointing fingers, but I have most of the D20 PDFs on the market, and this kind of thing bothers me.

Some PDFs bear mentioning that they use a very tight font, such as Gar'Udok which is 55 pages at a 9pt font.

 

[Ranger REG]

Other than how to portray the trademark logo on your product, there is nothing in the Guide to follow a certain standard, other than the "legible enough for a reasonable person to read" standard.

WotC uses smaller fonts as they tend to cram a lot of material (mostly rules) in a certain amount of pages they ordered for a book. Third-party d20 publishers don't have to cram a lot since most of the rules are already present in the Player's Handbook, which includes the character creation rules and character advancement.

Personally, 12-pt fonts are a lot easier on the eyes but if the material is large, it will take a lot of pages to cover it, thus the price of the book will increase. It may be bad for both the publisher and their consumers.

10-pt fonts allow the writers to put in a lot of words into the product. But readers can easily be more fatigued by reading them. Trust me, I couldn't sit through more than one chapter of the Player's Handbook without dosing off. It's not that the text is boring (well, sometimes) but even with my eyeglasses, the small text seems a lot harder to read when my eyelids keep falling over the pupils.

I guess it depends. Sometimes it is like a bag of chips. The bag is big but you get a lot of air that perceive it to be full but it isn't. Giving the appearance that the book is bulky can be perceived as having a lot of contents, when it may not be, especially with the large fonts (and lots of interior artworks and illustrations).

 

[sppeterson]

Personally I have no problem with .pdfs that puff the page count so long as it's done for usability. Ambient's Liber Equitis did this and I thought that was a good thing; it still came out to about 5 bucks for what would probably be a 32 page printed book. More importantly of course it was 5 bucks for quality material.

 

[DPGTony]

10 pt?

Depends on the book...

Aren't the core rulebooks even smaller than 10pt? (8 pt?)

And some of the other D20 third-party books are running higher than 12pt (which is huge).

The on-line publishers are REALLY bad for this - most of them are running with WAY lower text-density than the print publishers. There are a few good examples of 30 page products puffed up to 50 pages - I won't start pointing fingers, but I have most of the D20 PDFs on the market, and this kind of thing bothers me.

Some PDFs bear mentioning that they use a very tight font, such as Gar'Udok which is 55 pages at a 9pt font.

Dark Portal Games attempted to solve the problem for PDFs. Currently we use 9pt times new roman for body text in the print version so you save as much as practical on ink and 12 point in the screen version to save your eyes. Believe me, there's plenty of text density for the print version.

If the PDF publishers included the type size in their promo/advertising it would be helpful. We will start doing that.

 

[uv23]

Thanks for the replies so far. I apologize for the original error. I meant 9 vs 12. I believe wotc products use 9, not 10. I think the product that really drove this was home the dragonstar core rulebook, which seemed awfully "airy" to me.

 

[Christian Walker]

9pt Tahoma

I go with a 9 point. I have to in order to keep Scrollworks' page count within budget.

 

[Hard8Staff]

If you are concerned about bang for your buck, consider a few other things:

1) Size of margins

2) Artwork (more = less words)

3) spacing between lines of text (this is adjustable and can be used to stretch or squish text).

It has been my experience that most d20 publishers stretch their words to cover more pages and bump up the price. I've seen hardcovers heavily-laden with pictures and so-forth that have lower word counts than some of the bigger modules with a more crammed format.

If you really want to see if you're getting bang for your buck, pick a page of solid text and count the words. In fact, I think that would be a nice project for someone to do and post the results. It's let people know what kind of value they're getting for their product.

That being said, we've done some very rudimentary research into where content/word count falls on the consumer's purchasing decision value-meter and it doesn't look like a top issue (which is unfortuante for us because we cram those puppies 'til they're ready to burst). To be honest, we were a tad shocked since we always thought people bought RPGs for the content and NOT the pictures (comic books are for that), but alas, I think judging a book by it'scover and interior seems to be the way of things. I'd love to see some more formal research on this...

David Kenzer

 

[uv23]

I wasn't coming at this from as much of a value-per-dollar perspective as I was simply from an industry standard curiosity. I personally prefer to have a lot of art in my books *as long as the art is good* which it rarely ever is unfortunately.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

That being said, we've done some very rudimentary research into where content/word count falls on the consumer's purchasing decision value-meter and it doesn't look like a top issue (which is unfortuante for us because we cram those puppies 'til they're ready to burst). To be honest, we were a tad shocked since we always thought people bought RPGs for the content and NOT the pictures (comic books are for that), but alas, I think judging a book by it'scover and interior seems to be the way of things. I'd love to see some more formal research on this.

I've done the same thing for the same reasons. My understanding matches yours: the artwork matters far more than anecdotal evidence would suggest. My partner (the guy who did the map on my site) was forced to listen to me rant for two days about how I wanted to write a game book and not a comic book.

However, I imagine the desire for increased art affects your particular company less than others!