I find a similar slow-down — perhaps it’s discomfort — reading san serif faces, particularly if it’s a long passage. But I wonder if that has anything to do with how we first began to read, and/or how we have read ever since. Memory back that far cannot be relied on, perhaps, but it seems that I never was much aware of san serif fonts at least until I was out of high school. I appreciate them now for things like table heads and footnotes, where my old eyes need help sorting different types of material on the page. But for go-ahead straight through reading, those serifs seem downright essential.
Thanks for turning me on to Merriweather, Pigfender. I was recently editing a document in Google Docs, which offers it and some other attractive fonts as options, remembered your recommendation, and converted the doc to Merriweather-- and it made me Merri indeed! I second your recommendation and will now try to track it down for my Mac system.
Thanks also to troyscrivenerforum for encouraging me to download Courier Prime, which I did and have made my Scrivener body text font.
Thanks for the study. However, I don’t see how you reached that conclusion from their research. In fact, it seems quite contrary to the final statement of Moret-Tatay and Perea (2011, p.624),
The infographic also seems to run counter to the published research article.
Having said that, the article itself only measured reaction time for individual words. This would seem to be consistent with the historical (at least in my experience) demarcation between serif and sans-serif typefaces. My memory of the typeface “rules” is that serif was considered best for blocks of text (i.e. paragraphs) and sans-serif was considered best for headings and highlights. This would also be, more or less, consistent with the infographic.
I love the article, and am very grateful you posted it! But even if their findings are replicated, it still leaves open the question whether ease of recognising words presented individually carries over to ease of semantic interpretation of slabs of text. It may yet be that the 1980s claims were right (sans-serif typeface for headers, serif for paragraphs).
I’m looking forward to more.
Many thanks! 
There are many good, easy to read fonts, but for me it’s gotta be Palatino.
(For screenplay, I use John August’s Courier Prime. Designed specifically for screenwriters, it’s free: http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/ ).
When writing, though, in the rare instance Palatino isn’t available, I’ll go with what’s available. Legibility is all that matters to me in the creation phase.
Considering publication stage (which it haven’t reached yet), I’ll prefer to work with a professional book designer in selecting a font set.
Palatino. Courier Prime. And for publication: consult a pro designer.
Garamond, in that it is recommended by Smashwords. Have got used to the look and like it.
Since we all love fonts with a raging passion (thanks for the link, Brett), here is a font-related game to kern away a few moments… type.method.ac
Interesting game!, although I suck at it… 64 out of 100. 
Thank God there’s Scrivener!
Never heard of kerning games, but that was interesting. 80/100, with 100/100 on three of them!
For titles and headings a sans serif font like Albertus, Friz-Quadrata or Alberta extra light. These are actually flared fonts and not strictly san serif.
For body text I currently use Baskerville, Palatino and Latin Modern Roman.
Here is another typography site webtypography.net
Regarding serif vs sans serif debate for online use. This series of comments on an Adobe forum covers both sides but the conclusions is that now with higher resolution screens the choice is up to the author.
forums.adobe.com/thread/2287559
A relavant point made on that thread:
“Almost all mainstream printed newspapers, magazines, and books use serif type, and thus people are more accustomed to reading long texts in this style. However, given the research data, the difference in reading speed between serif and sans serif is apparently quite small. Thus, there’s no strong usability guideline in favor of using one or the other, so you can make the choice based on other considerations — such as branding or the mood communicated by a particular typographical style.”
Libertine (of Wikipedia fame) was linked to above, but if you like those kinds of flared hybrid fonts you might like Biolinium, also from the Libertine project, or Optima, free with every Mac. They are low-key and very clean, but have that subtle quasi-serif feel to them. I like these kinds of fonts in my index cards and outliner in Scrivener.
The flared hybrid fonts are clean and classy. They are different enough that they can be used in titles and headings to contrast with a serif body font. There is something about the aesthetics of sans-serif that I find disagreeable. de gustibus non est disputandum
A beautiful font.
Ibarra Real is available from here:
unostiposduros.com/unostipos … arra-real/
Spanish Wikipedia page has more info on its history: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibarra_Real
And on the topic of historical revival, this labour of love is also a beauty (I prefer humanist serifs like this to neoclassical serifs):
Check the specimen PDF here, lots of lovely opentype features (swashes, alternative ampersands that are gorgeous, a wonderful contextual ligature for [a|e|i|u]s, lovely long tail Q etc.), a true italic taken from Granjon, cyrillic and greek and lots of western characters, but no bold yet:
Thank you.
I fell in love with Nitti iA when iA Writer came out with it a few years ago. After a lot of work, I finally managed to extract the raw OTF files, and it’s now my default drafting font. Before that, I liked Menlo.
Do you know of any flared hybrid font that is unicode and supports diacritic marks for Sanskrit transliterations?