Thanks for posting that here. I somehow missed seeing it on DO. It’s definitely a bookmarkable site and I believe goes beyond just being appropriate for lawyers. That’s the kind of information that should be taught in elementary school, but seems to be unknown to most college graduates.

I agree, BlueStreak.

I don’t work for a lawyer, but an international company. That makes me want to send out a mass email with the link attached. It also works so well for corporate America.

That’s the kind of information that should be taught in elementary school, but seems to be unknown to most college graduates.

That’s because many schools are still packed full of teachers who learned the rules for typing on typewriters. Elementary school teachers should be the real audience for this web site!

Avoid using the core operating system fonts in printed documents. On Windows, that means Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Comic Sans, Courier, Georgia, Helvetica, any flavor of Lucida, Palatino, Trebuchet, and Verdana ...

Georgia? Seriously?

Butterick suggests avoiding Windows system fonts on the theory that they’re designed to look good on computer screens, not paper. I don’t think that advice applies to all Windows system fonts (e.g., Palatino, Georgia). However, I would eliminate Georgia (and several other decent system fonts) for normal legal use because Georgia uses old style figures in the Windows system version. Old style figures don’t jive with text that includes lots of legal citations. They just don’t. I don’t care how trendy OSF may be in typography circles, or how pretty some OSF sets are. OSF suck in legal usage.

So I don’t agree with Butterick in every detail. But I think that he’s right 95% of the time, or more. If lawyers slavishly followed his advice, legal briefs would look a lot better, and read a lot better.

I wish he’d suggested some good fonts to use for legal writing, instead of just suggesting fonts to avoid.

Zivatar: Please expand on your remarks about OSF in legal work. I’m not arguing with you; I know from nothing in this regard. I’d just like some more substantive comments. Something with a bit more meat than “OSF suck in legal usage.”

thanks.

powers

track

Agreed that it’s a very nice site. I like his visual explanation of what happens when setting two spaces between sentences. He also makes nice use of Cambria (CSS below) on the site, though this might be part of a WordPress template.

p, li {
font-family: Cambria, Georgia, Times New Roman, Calibri, serif;
font-size: 18px;
line-height: 25px;
}

Regarding the issue of OSF in legal writing, I just started a new thread and invite people to comment there:

Suitability of OSF vs LF for different fields of writing

Old style figures don’t jive with text that includes lots of legal citations. They just don’t. I don’t care how trendy OSF may be in typography circles, or how pretty some OSF sets are. OSF suck in legal usage.

I used to think so, but I changed my mind. I simply got used to it.

I like his visual explanation of what happens when setting two spaces between sentences.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned (though I’ve never had to seriously type on a typewriter just playing around when I was a kid) but I prefer two spaces after sentence final punctuation. And, he cheats in his example. He uses three spaces which I definitely agree is too much. It also has a nice disambiguating effect whenever you have a text that will have punctuation marks used as non-sentence enders. This happens more often in Spanish because it will flank portions of sentences that as needed. Often times in English is clear by the lack of capital letter post-punctuation, but it’s still possible for it to happen and I’d think that in a legal context the clearer things are the better.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)