Humanist
Alegreya was drawn for extended reading and it shows: the letterforms are faintly irregular in the way handwriting is, which keeps the eye moving where a perfectly even face lets it stall. Chapters open left under a rule with the number spelled out in words.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago … having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway, and she said nothing at all for a long while.
Use it for
Long literary fiction, translated work, books read in one sitting.
Do not use it for
Anything that needs to look institutional. The hand in these letters is an asset in a novel and a liability on a textbook.
What it decides
- Text face
- Alegreya, humanist serif, designed for long-form reading, by Juan Pablo del Peral, Huerta Tipográfica.
- Size and leading
- 11 pt on 15.9 pt (1.45×). Adjustable; this is where it starts.
- Paragraph indent
- 1.2 em, except the first paragraph of a chapter and the first after any break.
- Chapter opening
- Set left, sunk 24% down the text block, numbered in words, under a rule.
- Scene break
- A centred ✻ with space either side.
- Running head
- The book title on the left-hand page, the chapter title on the right, in small capitals.
- Page number
- At the foot, on the outer edge. Roman in the front matter, restarting at arabic 1 on the first chapter.
About the typeface
Alegreya is a humanist serif, designed for long-form reading, drawn by Juan Pablo del Peral, Huerta Tipográfica. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows it to be embedded in a document, including one you sell, without restriction or attribution in the book itself. The licences page reproduces the full text.
The print PDF embeds a subset of it, only the characters your book actually uses, so a three-hundred-page interior comes to a couple of megabytes rather than ten. The EPUB does not embed it by default, because an ebook reader has chosen their own face and size, often for their eyesight, and overriding that is the most damaging thing an ebook stylesheet can do. There is a switch if you want it anyway.
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