I've been using Adobe Garamond Pro, 11pt. for the body-text on my books. With these margins (see below), this has worked well with full justification. I do have to go through and condense the font in certain areas by 0.1pt. to make it look less like this. There's something about Adobe Garamond Pro that works like magic, where other fonts would make the text unreadable. I've experimented over and over, and found a "sweet spot" between font size, margins, and readability.

I'm moving up to a laser printer which changes everything, so I'd also like to start experimenting with other fonts with good scalability. What is your go-to font that works well with how Word manages scalability?


Here's my typical page setup:
1. Font: Adobe Garamond Pro 11pt
2. Margins: Book Fold, 20 pages/sheet


Top/Inside/Bottom = .38
Outside = .5
3. Paragraph: First line indent = 0.2
Window Orphan = OFF
4. Justification = FULL

Since you are using full justification you should select the "Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does" option in Tools | Options, Compatibility. That may improve the situation regardless of the font you use.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

This is an interesting setting. I did a side-by-side comparison on paper, using a laser printer, it really does the trick. And compared to a printed book, the Wordperfect setting looks more similar, although a little squeezed in some places. Like I normally would, I condensed the normal text by 0.1pt to tighten it up, and it didn't even come close to what the Wordperfect setting did. It must be able to condense in smaller increments than Word's .01pt.

I'm definitely going to try this on my next book. Thanks!

I'm glad I could help!

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional