Palatino is one of the most popular typefaces of the twentieth century, of which Book Antiqua is a close imitation.
Palatino Linotype is well suited to reading; it works well as a typeface for body text, both in reports and other long documents and in the text of a flyer or an invitation or a presentation. It has a bit of calligraphic panache in its details, especially in the italic, and a bit of the look of having been chiseled out in stone. It can look both modern and traditional at the same time.
Palatino has a traditional appearance, yet it is a thoroughly contemporary typeface intended for typesetting in the modern era. Type designer Hermann Zapf created Palatino originally as a metal typeface for the Stempel type foundry, then adapted it for Linotype for machine typesetting. Palatino went through many forms as new typesetting technologies were developed; Palatino Linotype was published by Microsoft in 1997 as the definitive version, and as a showcase for the capabilities of OpenType fonts, with many new characters drawn by Zapf and multilingual support for the Pan-European character set.
