Hello,
one of the people I am writing music for ( a church choir) is always concerned about the readability of the lyrics.
I guess there are some people who don’t have the best eyesight.
How can I improve the readability of the lyrics?
If I use the standard Academico and increase its font size to f.e. 13, it does not really help.
Using the bold version looks ugly; are there any good fonts one could use instead or which have proven to be easy on the eye?
Thank you for help.
There is always a compromise between legibility, actual size, metrics, and the distortion of note spacing. Don’t use Bold.
Minion Pro is a decent neo-Humanist typeface: designed to be legible with a large x-height. It has a Condensed style, meaning that the letters have been squished horizontally a bit, which helps to reduce spacing distortion while still being legible.
It also comes in “Optical Sizes”, e.g. the “Caption” style is designed to be clearer at smaller sizes than the “Normal” style.
So I’d suggest Minion Pro Condensed Caption. You could try 12pt, relative to the staff and the experiment from there.
Academico is an open-source interpretation of the classic Century Schoolbook fontface, which claims to be very readable. I think you can’t improve much by switching the font.
Maybe try something like Minion (Condensed) Caption? Plantin might be an option, too. It’s an excellent font, a meatier, surprisingly beautiful descendant of the Times family – though I admit that I don’t like it much in music notation.