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1. Attribution = you have to attribute the material by mentioning my name, the name of the website, and the URL;
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I hold the copyright in the material on this website. I’ll consider other uses (for instance, commercial uses) on request. However, this license doesn’t limit fair use under U.S. copyright law.

I use WordPress to publish the website. I use a heavily modified version of the veryplaintxt theme. For Windows visitors, the text font is Cambria, the headlines are Rockwell, and the menu is Calibri. For Mac visitors, I’m now testing out TypeKit: the text font is Athelas, and the headlines are FF Tisa. The rest is good old Helvetica Neue and Optima.

But if you’re working on documents with other lawyers—the most common examples are contracts, settlement agreements, etc.—you have less control and should adjust the typography accordingly.

The major problem is font choice. If you format your document with a font that your collaborator doesn’t have, the document won’t show up on their screen properly.

For maximum compatibility, use a system font. This is one of the few times that a system font is your best choice.  Your collaborators are likely to have it and those fonts look good on screen, where much of the collaboration happens.

Still, even when you use system fonts, 100% visual fidelity is not guaranteed. This is one reason some lawyers, me included, like to use numbered paragraphs when working on documents with other lawyers—it lets everyone refer to content unambiguously, because line breaks and page breaks can change unpredictably (i.e., “paragraph 3.1.2″ is the same thing no matter where it is in the document; “the paragraph at the top of page 5″ might change). Once the content of the document is finalized, you can clean up the formatting.

If it’s critical that your document appear the same way on your collaborator’s screen as it does on yours, the only foolproof technique is to share PDF files and use commenting and review tools on the PDF (e.g. using Acrobat).

I’m obligated to point out that this is not legal advice. Corrections and additions are welcome (I’m starting with the most populous states and working downward, so you’ll have to be patient, Wyoming attorneys.)

An excellent article by Ruth Anne Robbins, Painting With Print, has font rules for many of the jurisdictions not yet listed below.

If you practice in a jurisdiction that requires a monospaced font, you can still do better than the Courier that comes with your computer. There are actually hundreds of monospaced fonts out there—it’s still an active area of font design partly because monospaced fonts are preferred by software engineers and technical writers to display programming code.

(Original) Courier. The default Courier on your computer is actually “Courier New”, a soulless reinterpretation of the original 1956 Courier design. The original is still available, and still superior. If you want to stick with Courier, why not use the best Courier there is?

Letter Gothic and Prestige. Two classic 1950s typewriter fonts, commissioned by IBM for their typewriters.

TheSans Mono and TheMix Mono. Two modern monospaced fonts, each available in eight weights with italic styles.

Shorter lines are more comfortable to read than longer lines. As line length increases, your eye has to travel farther from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, making it harder to keep your place vertically. (That’s why newspaper columns are so narrow—newspaper columns are tall and thus it’s important to make vertical tracking as easy as possible.)

While there is no blackletter rule, aim for a line length of 50 to 90 characters (including spaces). You can check the line length of a sample text using the word count function of your word processor: select a series of lines and use word count to show the number of characters in each.

You can also use the easy “alphabet test” to set line length: type every lowercase letter from a to z. You should be able to fit 2 to 3 alphabets on your line, like so—

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmno

Shorter line lengths will make a big difference in the legibility and professionalism of your document. Most nonprofessional typographers, lawyers included, make their lines too long. This is probably because most word processors set the page margins at 1 inch by default. While that was fine in ye olde days when we used monospaced fonts, it’s too small for most proportional text fonts.

Generally, page margins of 1.5 to 2 inches will give you a comfortable line length if your text is set at 12 point. But focus on getting the number of characters per line into the right range. The smaller your font size, the larger your margins will need to be, and vice versa.

While courts often require 12-point (and sometimes even 14-point) fonts, it’s not the most comfortable size for reading. If you hold up a court document next to the average book, magazine, or newspaper, you’ll notice that the printing on the court filing is a lot larger.

The legibility of a font is tied not only to its size, but also the resolution of the output device. For instance, computer screens are relatively low-resolution—about 100 dots per inch—so the smallest comfortable reading size is about 12 points. (This was the default size of every font on the original Macintosh, which may be why 12-point became something of a standard in computer typesetting.)

But a document from a laserprinter is likely to contain about 600 dots per inch—36 times as many dots as a computer screen—so text is readable at smaller sizes. On professionally typeset materials, like publications and stationery, the font can be even smaller. Text on business cards is often set at only 7 or 8 points.

If you’re making a template for letterhead or other internal documents, don’t treat 12-point as the minimum. Try sizes down to 10-point, including intermediate sizes like 10.5-point and 11.5-point.

Also bear in mind that the point system is not an absolute scale—different fonts set to the same point size may not appear the same size on the page. For instance, the two fonts below—Sabon on the left, Arno on the right—are set at the same point size, but the Arno is still smaller.

Thus, when trying out a new font, let your eyes be the guide, not the point size. You can match sizes by printing out a sample of text in the old font, and then adjusting the size of the new font on screen until each line of text breaks in roughly the same place.

These line-spacing practices are another habit held over from the typewriter age. You could only move the carriage up vertically one line at a time on a typewriter, so your line-spacing choices were limited to single or double spacing. Double spacing became the default because single-spaced typewritten text is very hard to read.

Most courts adopted their line-spacing standards in the typewriter era, so that’s why they often require double-spaced lines. To be fair, double spacing is still useful for courts because a) it prevents lawyers from abusing page limits by jamming in the maximum lines per page and b) it creates room on the page for annotations for when the judge or the clerks are reading the papers.

For other documents, single spacing is typically too tight; one-and-a-half line spacing is too loose. The optimal line spacing is usually between 125% and 140% of the font size. So if you’re working with a 12-point font, you should use somewhere between 15 and 17 points of line spacing.

Word processors have a bewildering number of ways to set line spacing. Don’t be thrown off—it all comes back to the same thing.

Word: Line spacing in Word is handled by the Paragraph dialog box. The “Single”, “1.5 lines”, and “Double” options are equivalent to about 115%, 175%, and 230% line spacing. (Because that’s how Microsoft does math.) None of which you should use. Never use the “At least” option, because you will be giving Word permission to adjust your line spacing in unpredictable ways. “Exactly” is acceptable—you can enter a fixed line height. “Multiple” is also acceptable—instead of a percentage, you enter line spacing as a decimal. To get line spacing in the 125-140% range, use a Multiple value in the 1.10 to 1.25 range.

WordPerfect: the Format menu has options for Line Height and Line Spacing. (A distinction probably beloved by WordPerfect fans, but lost on me.) The Line Height box lets you set you line height as “Fixed” (OK) or “At Least” (not OK). The Line Spacing box lets you set line spacing as a multiple of the Line Height (also OK, though be careful of unintended consequences if you set Line Height to something other than Automatic).

Line spacing is called leading in some software programs because in days of yore, fonts were made out of metal, and to increase the space between lines, you would insert thin strips of lead between the lines.

Generally you should not add letterspacing to lowercase letters, but always add a little to all-caps text and small caps. In the samples below, you can see how the letterspacing makes the letters more distinct. This is particularly important at small sizes (e.g. the footer of a court filing).

Why use letterspacing for capital letterforms and not lowercase? Usually, capital letters appear at the beginning of a word or sentence, so they’re designed to fit next to lowercase letters. When you use capital letters together, that default spacing is too tight.

In the samples below, notice how the kerning pairs tighten the large gaps that occur between certain letter pairs so that they’re consistent with the rest of the font.

For the best look, you want to use these kerning pairs. But by default, kerning is not activated in Word or WP (no idea why) so you have to turn it on yourself.

The problem is that most people have never seen a real small caps font—they’ve only seen the small caps that Word and WP create by taking regular caps and scaling them down. Any time your word processor starts squishing or stretching type, be worried (cf. condensed vs. squished fonts).

Notice how the scaled small caps (top) are taller and wider than the real small caps (bottom), which are shorter and squarer. Also, the vertical strokes on the scaled small caps are skinnier, giving them a lighter “color” than the other characters. The real small caps have been designed to match the other uppercase and lowercase letters.

If you’re a recent law school graduate, you probably remember that law reviews use small caps for Bluebook-compliant footnote citations to publications and books. Don’t bring this habit to work. Bluebook Rule P.1(b) forbids practitioners from using small caps in citations to publications. Titles are italicized; authors’ names are not.

If you want real small caps, you’re going to have to buy them—they’re not included with the included version of Times New Roman or any other operating system font. But you can get them with most other professional text fonts.

Small caps, like all-caps text, benefit from some letterspacing.

Real small caps are so rare that when they actually show up in a legal document, it’s like a beacon of classiness. In terms of bang for the buck, there are few deals in this website better than small caps. Once you use them, you won’t go back.

But if you really don’t want to buy small caps, can I ask you not to use the small-cap formatting function in Word and WP? If you’ve followed the other lessons on this website and worked hard to make your typography sparkle, I’d feel terrible if you ruined it with those ersatz scaled small caps.