Roots wrote:I don't really know what a sans-serif/serif is,
You do now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif
Sans- means "without"; it's originally french, afaik. Serifs are those little notches that jut out at the end of strokes in a letter. If you write the capital letter "I" in a sans-serif font/script, you will use a single pen stroke. If you write it in a serif font, you'd probably do two little cross-strokes, one at the very top of the main stroke, one at the bottom.
Sans-serif:
[img:209:59]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/Serif_and_sans-serif_01.png[/img]
Serif:
[img:209:56]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/Serif_and_sans-serif_02.png[/img]
Supposedly, serifs enhance readability by guiding the eye along horizontal paths, and by offering increased visual cohesion within a word, making the spaces between them more clear. There are other theories - really when it boils down to it, I just think serif fonts look cooler.
My suggestions:
- A sans-serif font wouldn't kill us, but does look slightly out-of-place, or anachronistic in a medieval/fantasy setting. If you go to small sizes, a sans-serif would be more readable, as Eleazar said; however I don't think it's going to make much difference at our current text size - it would only become a problem if we dropped below 12pt text. Wesnoth uses a sans-serif font; it doesn't really break the immersion. Our text sizes are much larger than wesnoth, though, and I do think a sans-serif font looks cooler.
- The only suggestion I would give regarding readability would be to not make the same mistake that Diablo made. The only "fatal flaw" is to use a font wherein you can't tell what certain characters are (e.g. you can't tell if you're looking at a G or an S, as might be the case in some far-out "fantasy" font). For letters, it's not such a huge deal, since you can judge from context (the word they're part of, and the sentence they're in) what they are. But for numbers, it IS a big deal, numbers have no context to judge them in. Diablo used a really offbeat font; it looked really cool, and was generally no problem, except for one thing: You couldn't tell the difference between a 5 and a 9. Even with extensive familiarity, it was hard. So in short;
Make sure it's trivial to tell the difference between any number in the font we use. This should only be an issue if we pick a "fantasy" font for our text.