Ask The Typography Guru: What To Do About E-Filing?
Oh. Em. Gee. E-filing has finally come to the Texas courts of appeal!
I had heard a rumor and a report that it was here, but then it went away and now it's back again.
It must be true because it says so Don Cruse's Supreme Court of Texas Blog and Todd Smith's Texas Appellate Law Blog.
But this led me to ask myself a question. "Self," I said, "suppose all this e-filing means that courts of appeal will turn into giant computer banks, and all the judges and law clerks rely more on screen reading than on humble and old-fashioned paper? Then what?"
And my self said, "So what. Get a life."
But I persisted. "Should I be using a different type of font for these screen readers than I use for judges who like paper? I mean, I know that fonts like Georgia have been optimized for screen reading. Should I use those?"
And my self answered, "How should I know? I'm not the typography guru. That would be Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers, winner of the award for Awesomest Legal Book Ever. Ask him."
So that's just exactly what I did. After the break is part one of the official Butterick take on fonts for screen reading--and the answer will surprise you. It's something about smart rasterizers.
I didn't even know I had a rasterizer, let alone that it had an IQ.
From Matthew Butterick:
Typography for Lawyers: screen-reading edition
More documents are moving between lawyers in electronic format. And more courts are requiring electronic filing in PDF. So lawyers ask me what fonts are best for screen reading.
Some have heard that the core Microsoft fonts — including Georgia, Verdana, Calibri, and Cambria — were designed for the screen. They conclude that these are always the best fonts to use in a document that will likely be read on screen.
A reasonable conclusion, but not entirely correct.
If you're sharing documents in a word-processing file format (like Microsoft Office .doc or WordPerfect .wpd), then the core Microsoft fonts are usually the best. Nearly everyone already has them installed. They don't look great printed, but on the screen, they're sharp and easy to read.
But if you're sharing PDFs, the answer changes: the best font for the screen is whatever font you prefer in print.
OK, I see some hands going up in the back. "How is that possible? Surely, screen reading using PDF is the same as screen reading using a word processor."
Nope, it's not. Here's the long answer.
How fonts look on screen is determined by the font itself, and the software that converts the font into screen pixels, called the rasterizer. The rasterizer is like a printer, but for the screen rather than paper. Just as your printer converts a font into dots on paper, the rasterizer converts a font into pixels on screen.
(A pixel is one dot on your screen. It was originally an abbreviation of picture element.)
So if you want to know which font will look best on screen, you need to consider what rasterizer will be displaying it.
From Kendall:
Next time we'll get the down and dirty on rasterizers why PDFs look great on screen, even when the "same" font in Microsoft word does not. And even more, why not to use Microsoft screen optimized fonts in an e-filing.
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This seems like a tricky area. Can you really know in advance which PDF software (and thus rasterizer) your audience will be using?
That may be a question for the expert--i.e., not me. I had not thought beyond Adobe and in fact know of no other pdf software. Are we safe in assuming the court is using adobe?
I suspect they have Adobe Reader on their office machines. They might or might not have that set as their default PDF reader for all use cases. For example, if they open a PDF through the web browser (as the Court might be particularly likely to do using its own docket pages), then the web browser might try to open and display the PDF itself.
On a Mac, the default PDF reader is called "Preview." It's snappier to load than Adobe's, and so it's what I keep as my default. If a Justice or law clerk has a personal Mac and reads your brief on that device, then they'll likely use Preview.
And if your reader opens the file on a device such as an iPad (some Justices have), a Kindle (a few appellate Justices in Texas use these), or take a quick look at the PDF using their iPhone or Blackberry at a short-fuse motion... they will be dependent on the software in each of these devices.
That's the background for my question.
True, there are numerous ways of viewing a PDF. (In fact, I use Preview more than Acrobat for reading PDFs.) But my advice doesn't change. The only time that the Microsoft core fonts have a screen-legibility advantage is when the Windows rasterizer is drawing the text. And that only happens in a Windows word processor.