February 4, 2008 Does Any Law Require All Capitals?

This post on use of all capitals in contracts—it’s from Legal Frontier, Andrew Mitton’s blog—reminded me of a question that I’ve asked myself occasionally.
The Legal Frontier post is about how use of all capitals makes contract text harder to read. That wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who pays the slightest attention to typography, […]

December 28, 2007 What in a Contract Requires Typographic Emphasis?

In a recent post I said that along with switching from Times New Roman I’d be abandoning underlining in favor of bold.
But here’s a related question: I’ve previously used underlining to emphasize section headings, each defined term when it’s being defined, and references to exhibits and schedules. (See MSCD 12.9.) Should I use bold in […]

December 20, 2007 And I’m Getting Rid of Underlining, Too

In MSCD 12.9, I recommend using underlining to emphasize section headings, each defined term when it’s being defined, and references to exhibits and schedules.
Underlining—or rather underscoring, to use typographer terminology—is a typewriter convention created to approximate common typographic effects that couldn’t be achieved with a typewriter. Typographers don’t like it. James Felici, The Complete Manual […]

December 20, 2007 It’s Time for a Typeface Change

[Update, 12/21/07 3:30PM EST: Previously I linked to Word 2003 versions of a document in Times New Roman and the same document in Calibri. I belatedly realized that that would only confuse matters, so I’ve now linked instead to PDFs.]
Brace yourselves—I’m proposing a change of typeface.
The Current Regime
I suggested in this November 2006 post that […]