Manual
Inter for every heading, Source Serif 4 for the text. The split is the oldest convention in technical publishing and it works for the same reason it always did: a sans heading is unmistakably a heading at a glance, which is what a reader skimming for the section they need is doing. Subheadings, lists and tables are all set to carry weight rather than to disappear.
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
Business, self-help, how-to, textbooks, anything with subheadings and lists.
Do not use it for
Fiction. A sans-serif chapter number over a novel reads as a report.
What it decides
- Text face
- Source Serif 4, transitional serif, by Frank Grießhammer, Adobe.
- Heading face
- Inter, neo-grotesque sans, by Rasmus Andersson.
- Size and leading
- 10.5 pt on 15.1 pt (1.44×). Adjustable; this is where it starts.
- Paragraph indent
- None. Paragraphs are separated by space instead, which suits a book that is scanned rather than read straight through.
- Chapter opening
- Set left, sunk 18% down the text block, numbered in arabic figures, under a rule.
- Scene break
- White space alone, the gentlest break there is, and the one that never interrupts the reading.
- Running head
- The book title on the left-hand page, the chapter title on the right.
- 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
Source Serif 4 is a transitional serif, drawn by Frank Grießhammer, Adobe. 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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