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I'm trying to put together a comic I wrote, and I cannot figure out what font size I should be using. I set up my page template according to this guide, a "7″x10″ full color book aimed at print".

Now, following the tips located here, they recommend"9.5(size)/10(leading) for full size art, or 6.35/6.75 for printed size".

My question is am I working on full size or printed size in gimp? My stuff is kind of text-heavy and I'm finding if I use 10 point fonts it tends to take up a lot of space that would otherwise go to the art. But the 6.75 looks kind of tiny on my screen. Also, I'm a long ways from printing, right now I'm just trying to create the content.

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  • 6.75 sounds too small to be comfortably read, so that guess must be based on the fact that cartoon fonts tend to be drawn "large" (when compared with other fonts at the same size) and all-caps. Print out one of your pages at "print size", and see what size you like most.
    – Jongware
    Commented Jan 14, 2017 at 16:33
  • If content is designed to be read, fairly easily, I would not go below 9pt type.
    – Scott
    Commented Jan 14, 2017 at 17:14

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The fonts size is... whatever looks good. Your real problem is creating images that are big enough to print correctly at 300PPI (or 400PPI as in your tutorial). If your comic print size is 8-inch across that means an image which is at least 2400pixels wide.

Then if you use Gimp in dot-for-dot mode (View>Dot-for-dot), the image is displayed with your screen definition (around 100PPI for standard displays, 200PPI for high def ones) so it is 3 times (300PPI/100PPI) bigger on your screen that in print. So to evaluate the readability of a font, zoom out to 33% or uncheck "dot-for-dot". In Gimp that would put your font size around 25px...

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  • thanks, this is exactly the information I was looking for.
    – Kevin Milner
    Commented Jan 15, 2017 at 18:52

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