Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Fonts for PDF on mobile Readers

[rplantz]

I realize that font selection is highly subjective, but I value the opinions of others. My primary goal is readability on mobile devices.

I've written a book about assembly language, so it has lots of code examples. The beta version uses New Century Schoolbook for the text with Bera Mono (scaled 85%) for the code. I produce it in both print and PDF versions. Almost all the students prefer the PDF so they can read it on their mobile devices, so I'm trying to determine if there are better fonts for mobile devices that would still look okay in print. (The PDF version has small, uniform margins for e-reading, and I've done the arithmetic to maintain the same pagination between the two versions. This will fail unless I use the same font for both versions.)

In the mono font I need both bold (for keywords) and italic (for comments). So far I think that DejaVu might be the best for my purposes. The case for using sans serif for screens and serif for print does not seem settled. DejuVu seems to be a reasonable compromise because it seems to have simple serifs (to my unprofessional eye).

I prefer using free fonts. I produce the book using TeX Live 2011 running on Ubuntu Linux.

I have attached a sample page using DejaVu to give an example of what is needed.