Had a terrible experience trying to typeset my first document with Adobe Caslon Pro in Word. In Word Mac, 27 page all text document rendered to 70 MB PDF with Opentype features enabled, well under a megabyte with Opentype features disabled in compatibility settings for the same font. Opening same document in Word for Windows (both 2010 and 2013) displayed with incorrect (increased) line spacing and Opentype features (e.g. Ligatures) disabled even though they were enabled in compatibility setting (they showed up when I opened the same document in Mac). Had a terrible experience trying to typeset my first document with Adobe Caslon Pro in Word. In Word Mac, 27 page all text document rendered to 70 MB PDF with Opentype features enabled, well under a megabyte with Opentype features disabled in compatibility settings for the same font.
Opening same document in Word for Windows (both 2010 and 2013) displayed with incorrect (increased) line spacing and Opentype features (e.g. Ligatures) disabled even though they were enabled in compatibility setting (they showed up when I opened the same document in Mac). On further investigation I don't think this problem was specific to Caslon Pro, though it is most evident with it.
When I changed the font from Caslon Pro to Times New Roman, the generated file went form 70MB to 25MB, which is still huge given that it was only 25 pages of text, but in either font was under a MB with Opentype off. It may have something to do with the file having first been created as a.DOC by a coworker, then being converted to.DOCX by me, processed for 'compatibility' (hah!), and having Opentype at that point turned on. Just another Word bug I guess.
I'm tinkering with a small booklet that contains an ancient Buddhist sutta text and modern commentary, interweaved in a form of reading monologue: some sutta text, some commentary, more sutta text, and so forth.For the sutta text I thought to use Caslon but can't quite come up with a font for the modern commentary. Something light and sans-serif, perhaps, even italic?If not Caslon and a light sans-serif, then what other pairings would make sense? Somehow I'm not drawn to using normal/bold combination of the same font though.EDIT After I've accepted Andrew Leach's answer, I started poking around FontShop for a while. I quite like the proposal of using the same family in serif/sans, and for example Milo seems to make for a legible reading type. The old sutta text set in Milo Serif Medium:and descriptive commentary in the lighter and more modern looking Milo Light Italic:In that case, should I use size variations of Milo Light Italic for headings? There won't be any more than chapter headings.
Adobe Caslon Pro Semibold Italic
What about table of content, and opening pages? One of the problems with Caslon is that it's very old-fashioned. That is obviously what has attracted you to using it, but its age and the style of the time is that the tracking is naturally quite wide:When trying to get a sans to go with that, which is a good idea, you need to consider the letter-shapes (like the high cross-bar on e and the upward slope of the bowl of a and perhaps the little tail of u):But you also need to consider x-height (this sans is too great) and although the overall width here is similar, each letter is wider and natural tracking is reduced.
It may be possible to use a font like this — this is — and tweak its metrics so that the letters are slightly narrower and they are spaced a little further apart.Pehaps something like would do, although this doesn't appear to come in a lighter weight than this, which may need a heavier version of Caslon.On the other hand, if you can discount Caslon, there are a number of families which are available in both serif and sans form: those are bound to match. These are a couple of my favourites:::All images from.