Fabula is a typeface designed at the University of Reading to help with legibility for school teaching. It's been tested in groups with children and their grown ups.
You can download the font file (Fabula with a two storey 'a') or download the font file (Fabula with a single storey 'a') and add it to your computer, for use in your own documents.
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The Fabula typeface was originally designed as a screen font as part of a project that produced software to enable children and teachers to produce bilingual story books. Since then, changes have been made to its design and it is now, additionally, a font suitable for titling and text setting in large sizes. Fabula was designed by a team led by Sue Walker that included Conrad Taylor, Vincent Connare, Gerry Leonidas and José Scaglione.
Sue writes: It has been used in a series of tests designed to find out what children in year 2 think about typefaces in the books they read. They descibed Fabula as 'clear, so you can see it properly'; 'normal'; 'like an ordinary book'.
Stylistically, Fabula has long ascenders and descenders (to help identify the word shapes), an informal feel, rounded terminals, a rounded e, a clear distinction between characters that might be easily confused, such as the (a, o) pair and the (l, 1) pair.
Fabula 1 has a double storey a. Fabula 2 has a single storey a.