Choose your fonts

Fonts give a book its voice before anyone reads a word. This page explains how Write thinks about them—three main faces, with everything else following one of them—and how to change them. It's all on the Fonts tab of Page setup (in the Book menu).

The quickest way: pick a look

At the top of the Fonts tab, Looks are whole settings made for a kind of book—Classic, Epic Fantasy, Space Opera, Thriller, Contemporary Romance, Literary and more. Each one sets the fonts, the title style and the chapter opening together, in one click. Try a few and watch the preview.

A look is a starting point, not a cage. Change anything afterward and the setup becomes your own; the card above says when you've moved away from the look you picked.

Screenshot: the Looks row, with one look selected and its name highlighted.

The three main faces

Under Faces:

• Body — the font your story is set in. A book serif reads best over a whole novel: Pagella (Write's stand-in for Palatino), Bonum, Alegreya, EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Literata.
• Headers and titles — chapter and part titles. This is where a display font can show off: Cinzel for an epic, Orbitron for space opera, Playfair Display for a romance.
• Front and back matter — the dedication, copyright page, about the author and the rest. Often the same as the body; a clean sans gives those pages a voice of their own.

Screenshot: the Faces section of the Fonts tab, showing the Body, Headers and titles, and Front and back matter font lists, each with its font name shown in that font.

There's also Alternate body, a second face for words you've marked in the text—a sign, a letter, a line in someone else's hand. (You mark them with the Aa button that appears when you select text.)

Title style sets chapter titles in regular, italic, bold or bold italic, and Matter size lets the front and back matter be a point larger or smaller than the body, which can help when that face is a sans.

The fonts are grouped in each list—serif, sans, display and monospace, then any you've uploaded—and each list shows its font underneath, so you can see it before you choose.

The smaller pieces

Below the main faces, a handful of pieces can have a font of their own: the Book title on the title page, the Title page details (by-line, series line, publisher), the Chapter sub-headers (the rows under a chapter title, like a date or a place), and the Headers and footers. Each one follows one of the main faces unless you choose otherwise, so changing the main face changes them too.

Colors

Under Colours, the chapter titles, the chapter sub-headers and the initial capital can each have a color. Leave a color blank and it's the page's own ink—black on the printed page. In an ebook, a reader's night mode may override colors so the text stays readable.

Familiar names

If you know a font by another name—Palatino, Garamond, Times, Georgia—Write maps it to the nearest font it carries. Every font that comes with Write is licensed for print and for ebooks, so you can use any of them freely.

To use a font of your own, see Use your own fonts.