Chicago Manual Of Style Font Requirements Explained
The Chicago Manual of Style does not actually prescribe one single font. This is the first thing most people get wrong when they start formatting a manuscript for a publisher or academic journal. The 17th edition, which is the current version, gives you a range of acceptable options and some firm rules about what those options need to look like on the page. It cares far more about consistency and readability than about whether you picked the "right" typeface. Here is what the manual actually says you should use. Manuscript text should be set in a 10- to 12-point type. That means if you are using Times New Roman, 12 point is standard. If you are using something like Garamond or Georgia, 11 point is usually the sweet spot because those fonts render slightly smaller on screen than Times New Roman at the same point size. You can use a sans-serif font like Arial, but it needs to be a clean, widely available version, not some decorative variant your word processor tried to sell you. The font has to be black on white. This sounds ridiculous to say out loud, but I have seen submission packets where people sent files with colored text or gray shading because they were formatting for a magazine layout and forgot to strip it out before switching to manuscript mode. Publishers will reject it immediately. Stick to plain black text on a white background.
Line spacing matters more than the font choice itself. Manuscript drafts should be double-spaced. Quotations longer than a certain threshold get special treatment and can be single-spaced in an indented block, but your main body text stays double. If you are submitting to a specific journal or press, they may have their own override on top of CMOS, but CMOS is the baseline most people follow.
What Fonts People Actually Use
Times New Roman is the default recommendation. It is the most common font in academic and publishing workflows because almost every system has it and it renders consistently across different operating systems. Garamond is the second most common choice, especially among literary publishers who want something that feels less institutional. Arial and Georgia come up when someone prefers a sans-serif, but they are less common in print submissions. Here is a practical detail nobody tells you about Garamond: different versions of Garamond exist from different foundries, and they do not look the same. The Adobe Garamond Pro version renders darker and denser than EB Garamond, which looks lighter and more open. If a publisher says "Garamond," they probably mean the general family, but if you are preparing a manuscript for your own purposes, pick one version and stick with it throughout. Mixing Garamond variants in the same document is an easy way to get caught out during a proofread, and you will not notice it until someone points it out.
Get the Full Details
A Problem I Ran Into With CMOS Formatting
A few years ago I was preparing a manuscript for a university press that required CMOS compliance. Everything seemed fine until the copyeditor flagged that my footnotes were using a different font than my body text. I thought I had applied the same font throughout. What had happened was that my word processor's default footnote style was pulling from a template that used a slightly different font size and weight. The footnotes were technically still Times New Roman, but they were 9.5 point instead of 10 point, and the publisher's production team could see the difference when they ran their checks. The fix was straightforward but annoying. I went into the style editor, found the Footnote style definition, and manually changed it to match the body text exactly: same font, same point size, same line spacing. Then I copied the corrected footnote style and applied it to every footnote in the document. That took about twenty minutes for a 200-page manuscript. I learned to check footnote styles against body text as the very first step of any CMOS compliance pass after that. You would be surprised how often word processors create silent mismatches between the main text style and the footnote style.
Point Size Is Where Most People Mess Up
The CMOS range of 10 to 12 point sounds generous, but publishers tend to have a narrower band in practice. Most accept 10-point or 11-point, and very few want 12-point because it makes the manuscript look padded. If your advisor or editor asks for 10-point, use 10-point. If they do not specify, 10.5 or 11 is the safest middle ground for most serif fonts. The one exception is when you are typesetting the actual book itself rather than preparing a manuscript draft. Typeset books frequently use 9.5 or even 9-point type, which is smaller than what CMOS recommends for manuscripts. CMOS governs the preparation stage, not the final typesetting stage. Headings and titles get different treatment. CMOS allows headings to be set in a slightly larger point size or bolded, but it does not require a specific heading font. The important part is that the heading style is consistent throughout the document. I have seen manuscripts where the chapter titles were in 14-point bold but the section headers inside the chapters had no consistent size at all. That creates a visual mess that copyeditors will spend hours fixing.
Common Pitfalls With CMOS Font Compliance
One thing that catches people out is the difference between what looks right on screen and what CMOS actually requires. A lot of modern word processors default to Calibri or another sans-serif font. If you start a new document and never change the font, you are not in CMOS compliance even though your document looks perfectly normal. Calibri is not a bad font, but CMOS traditionally favors serif fonts for body text in academic and trade publishing contexts, and many publishers will ask you to switch before they accept your manuscript. Another issue is embedded fonts in PDF submissions. If you send a PDF and the recipient's system does not have your chosen font installed, the PDF viewer will substitute a different font automatically. This can change the point size, the character spacing, and the overall density of the page. Before submitting any PDF, open it on a different machine or at least check the properties to confirm the font is embedded. Most professional PDF export settings include an option to embed fonts, but it is often turned off by default in consumer-grade software.
What CMOS Does Not Cover
The CMOS font guidelines stop at the manuscript level. They do not tell you anything about page layouts for final publication, cover design, or digital formatting for e-books. If you are producing a physical book, the typesetter will reflow your manuscript into their own type specifications, which may differ from what you used in your draft. The CMOS font rules are about how you prepare the document for review and editorial work, not about how the final printed page should look. This distinction matters because people sometimes conflate manuscript preparation standards with final production standards and then get confused when their formatted Word document does not match the printer's galley proofs. If you are working on a project that requires both CMOS compliance and a very specific design layout, like a literary journal or a heavily illustrated academic volume, plan on two separate workflows. Do your formatting and footnoting according to CMOS first. Then hand the cleaned manuscript to whoever handles the design stage. Trying to do both at the same time usually compromises one or the other.
