General ⇒ Typical font size used for a large physics book

[Cham]

I've written a large book on physics, with lots of equations, figures and tables. The document is huge (about 2000 pages!!). Currently, I used 12pts fonts. This isn't for publishing (it's my personal notes on physics). I recently tried 11pts for the main font and found that it's pretty.

I'm now wondering about the typical published physics books, that we can find in any scientific library. What is the font size used?

Is 10pts too small for a typical large book on physics? What about 11pts? Is it standard?

[Johannes_B]

Go to the library and look at the books. A ruler might be handy.

There is no standard, at least not that i am aware of.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Great project! Instead if measuring font size you could also count the number if lines oer page to compare. But the visual appearance is as you like but the best physics books are a good reference. You like them, you may do similar.

Stefan

[Cham]

I believed that there were some standards about font size, and that maybe 11pts isn't a good choice since it's a prime number, while 12pts could be a good base number.

[Johannes_B]

10pt is the default for the standard classes, while it is 11pt for KOMA-classes.

12pt on the other hand, is quite large. But i think it is (was?) WORD's standard.

Personally, i wouldn't use 12pt for a book. Unless it is for children, they need a bigger font size; maybe even 14pt. With children, i mean reading learners, they need bigger fonts to better distinguish the different letters. But i guess they won't read a book on physics

[Cham]

I was thinking about 10pts too. 10pts is standard for most LaTeX classes? I thought it was too small.

I agree that 12pts is a bit too big. My 2000 pages document was written in 12pts, and I want to change that.

[Johannes_B]

Out of interest, how many pages does your document have, if you change it to 10pt?

The difference can be quite large, or very small, depending on how much control you enforced concerning floats.

[Cham]

This is what I'm testing. I want to reduce that insane number of pages!

Using 11pts doesn't reduce it much. But then I have used a lot of contraints in the document, and I'll need to clean all this.