As a note to you, Charlie Ellis, and to less informed readers, the Charlie I mentioned in my blog post is Charlie Matlack, who asked me about font choice for résumé some weeks ago. Mr. Ellis and I have, nonetheless, discussed typography previously and I much appreciate his reaction.

I believe I made the switch to single-spaced sentences nearly a decade ago for purely aesthetic reasons. I did not know the behavior was "correct" but I knew I disliked the way double-spaced sentences look when printed from a computer (or on the web).

Would you speak to specific problems you have with his policies on punctuation?

His focus is certainly on printed materials, as the legal field stills deals primarily in physical documents. I absolutely agree that more conservative, standard font choices are correct for on-screen communication. If a potential employer requests a résumé as a Word document, I cringe and then deliver a relatively unstyled version, without fear of errors in its display. I much prefer a carefully generated PDF for this class of documents. And I believe one can generate a PDF with embedded fonts and text selection and search capabilities.

In the CSS3 specification, font-face embedding is allowed. In other words, the HTML document can specify a font file on the server that is downloaded to the user's computer for proper display of a typeface. The major issue in this behavior is font licensing infringement. The less significant but more widespread issue will be the rising prevalence of eye-assaulting web font choices. Check out Typographica and A List Apart for more discussion.

As for e-mails and Word documents, I do not know of any means of embedding fonts.

As someone who rarely worries much about shaving for work, let alone polishing my shoes, I find some of this stuff a bit over-the-top, but I like the ideas, guidelines, and generally agree with his taste. For example, I always used Garamond as the font for my resume, which made copious use of small caps. I liked, and still like, that it gave the document a lighter, livelier, somewhat willowy feel, while still appearing elegant and professional.

And, though his ideas on punctuation seem a bit off to me, I do hereby solemnly promise to try to stop double spacing my sentences (it may take my fingers a while to unlearn their habits).

Also, he doesn't talk much about online font choices, and most of the stuff I write, both at work and in personal life, is primarily intended for consumption on a computer screen and only occasionally printed. In such cases, doesn't a balance have to be struck between novelty (not making the default choice) and getting something that is on the system? It seems like picking something not on your readers' systems is a disaster, since font substitution will kick in and the result is something that's not only standardized but also completely unanticipated.

In such circumstances, the choice of Verdana or even Calibri for email or a Word doc seems like an OK one to me. While I may want to avoid Helvetica or Palatino, is there some font-embedding technology that I don't know about that would let me pick something like Minion and be confident that it's available to all my readers.

What do you think, Drew?