I am most of the way through writing a book, so I thought I would give it a go for yucks. I was using Times New Roman because that is both dense and pretty. Atkinson is much more Helvetica like, which can look a bit rough when justified into blocks of text, but this looks pretty smooth. I am sticking with a font that everyone has for now, but I am tempted…
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U vvot, nn8?
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Are yoou responsible for layout, or just the content?
I do the content, including a lot of graphs and images. I finally got this done when I was on furlough. A friend of mine has got his published. Newton wrote the Principia when Cambridge was closed for the plague, so expect lots of good books. But I have to lay it out and make it look book-ish to convince people that this is a worthwhile thing. The house style doesn’t fit, and the people who do the manuals use FrameMaker; so for now I am going it alone with LibreOffice.
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I was hoping that this was in SIL Open Font License, so that people can start adapting this to their own uses. Alas, close, but not OFL.
Braille Institute of America, Inc. provides Atikinson Hyperlegible for use, without derivatives or alteration, to the public free of charge for all non-commercial and commercial work. No attribution required.
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If at all possible financially and in terms of not having to duplicate work already done, do yourself a favour and get desktop publishing software. Word processors are not equipped for doing layout, especially for book-length projects.
Affinity Publisher is only around $50 a copy (and it’s an actual copy, not an Adobe or Microsoft style rental agreement) and it can do most things InDesign or QuarkXpress can do. There will be a bit of a learning curve but it’s worth it in the end product.
(I’m not in any way affiliated with Affinity, just a fan of their products. In fact I’m using Publisher right now when I’m not procrastinating typing this message)
I am inclined to think that justified text would add to the reduced legibility with varying inter-character spaces and the increase of “rivers” of white in the text.
There are some surprising choices in there, making the V and W over cap height for example and putting a bar on the 1 rather than the 7 (guess it was designed for a primarily English speaking audience).
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Yes, I need to be extra careful about Polish
Given that my workflow looks like
Find old newspaper in language that I don’t know.
OCR it,
Run it through Google Translate to see if it merits further study.
This actually could happen.
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I like ‘rivers of white’ - I was stuck for a description and that will do. That is what I was getting with Helvetica, and not so much with Atkinson. Yes, the legibility does go down a bit, but I have lots of diagrams with titles and foot notes, and casting the text into blocks helps separate it from the other junk.
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It’s an actual typographic term
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I am an actual typographer. 
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Flivver.
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