Large Print Hardback Books: How to Print One People Can Actually Read

Picture it. Your grandmother opens the family history you spent two winters researching, holds it at arm's length, then quietly asks where her reading glasses went. Every word is there. She just can't get at them.

Large print closes that gap between a finished book and a readable one. More than two million people in the UK are living with sight loss, according to RNIB's key statistics, and the charity predicts that figure will double to over four million by 2050. Add older readers whose eyes have simply changed, and children still working out what a lowercase g looks like, and ordinary book type leaves a lot of people behind.

This guide is for anyone commissioning large print hardback books: authors, family historians, small publishers and charities. We've spent twenty years printing books in Colchester, and our views below sit beside the UK guidance wherever it commits to a number.

Large print serves three kinds of reader, and each needs something slightly different

Readers with sight loss are the obvious audience and the most varied. Macular degeneration can take the centre of someone's vision; glaucoma tends to take the edges. So RNIB and the UK Association for Accessible Formats (UKAAF) both start from the same advice: ask the reader. UKAAF even notes that someone with tunnel vision but sharp acuity may read more slowly at bigger sizes, because they only see a few letters at once.

Older readers form the second group. Plenty wouldn't say they have sight loss at all; they simply read more comfortably with bigger type and better light. For a memoir or a book of a grandparent's letters, they're often the entire audience, which makes large print the main edition rather than the special one.

Early readers are the third. Children learning letterforms need big, open type with clear differences between a, o and e, which is why type gets so much attention in our guide to school phonics book printing, and why so many best loved children's hardbacks set their words large. Our educational children's book printing case study shows a book made for young readers.

UKAAF adds that people with dyslexia, or with physical difficulty handling a book, can need accessible formats too. For charities and public bodies there's a legal angle: UKAAF calls accessible information a key requirement of the Equality Act for service providers. The same rules cover a clear print annual report.

UK guidance puts large print at 16 point minimum and 18 point ideally

UKAAF publishes Creating clear print and large print documents (reference G003, version 4, approved March 2024), and RNIB answers the same question on its help page about print sizes. Their numbers sit close together:

• Clear print: UKAAF sets 12 point as the minimum and recommends 14. RNIB says clear print is usually 14 point.
• Large print: UKAAF's floor is 16 point, with 18 recommended. RNIB says large print is usually 16 point or higher.
• Giant print: UKAAF says 24 point is sometimes called giant print; RNIB uses the term from 18 point upwards, and its library's giant print books are 24 point.
• Regular print, for comparison: RNIB puts it at usually 10 or 12 point.

Clear print is for the general public; large print is for people with low vision. For one large print edition with a general readership, 18 point is the figure we'd build around, because it's UKAAF's recommendation rather than its floor. If you're printing for one named person, ask them, then test it. Where a single size can't suit everyone, UKAAF suggests producing a range such as 14, 18 and 24 point.

Point size lies, so judge large print type by its x height

A point size measures the body the letters sit on, a hangover from metal type, and says little about the letters you actually see. That's why 14 point Arial looks noticeably bigger than 14 point Times New Roman. UKAAF offers a more honest yardstick, the x height (the height of a lowercase x): 2.8mm for 16 point and approximately 2.9mm for 18 point. A ruler soon shows whether your elegant typeface is quietly shrinking the page.

We'd choose a sturdy, open typeface at regular weight and judge it at 18 point on real paper. The alternative, a light or condensed face, looks graceful on a monitor and falls apart for anyone whose vision blurs fine detail; UKAAF singles out the light version of Arial as inaccessible. On serif versus sans serif it's refreshingly frank. Its summary asks for a legible sans serif such as Arial, yet the detailed notes admit there's no definitive evidence either way and list Times New Roman among the legible examples. RNIB suggests Arial or the specialist face Tiresias.

Drop italics, underlining and long runs of capitals, since all of them distort the word shapes readers lean on, and use bold for emphasis. Keep every line at body size, page numbers, captions and footnotes included. A large print book with 9 point footnotes is a large print book with a locked door at the back.

Big type reads better with generous leading and a ragged right edge

Leading is the distance from one baseline to the next, written as 12/15 for 12 point type on 15 point leading. UKAAF says extra leading helps readers recognise letter shapes and can improve reading speed, but too much space between lines, words or letters makes reading harder again. Give 18 point type a touch more air than your software's default, then print a page and read it in ordinary room light.

Turn justification off. A justified column stretches the gaps between words to square up both edges, and at large sizes those gaps can be mistaken for the end of a line. Left aligned text with a ragged right edge keeps spacing even and gives the eye a fixed starting point, which helps most when someone's field of vision is narrow. Switch off automatic hyphenation too: UKAAF asks for words, names, dates and phone numbers to stay whole on one line wherever possible.

Line length is where trim size earns its keep. At 18 point an A5 page fits only a handful of words per line, so the reader keeps hopping back to the margin and losing their place. Our hardbacks run from A5 up to A4 portrait or A4 landscape, and a wider page gives big type room to run; the wide hard cover photography book in our video suits picture led books where photographs and short passages share a spread. A square format hardback is a happy medium for memoirs that mix text with family photographs. Whatever the size, skip columns, which UKAAF says to avoid or cut back.

Uncoated paper beats silk for large print because glare blurs big type too

UKAAF is plain about paper. Use matt, because it doesn't reflect light, and make it thick or opaque enough that print can't show through from the reverse; 80gsm is sometimes sufficient, it says, and 100gsm usually suitable. For a large print hardback we'd go heavier, such as the 120gsm uncoated we often use inside hardbacks. Uncoated paper has no sheen, so a reading lamp won't bounce off the page, and the extra weight stops heavy 18 point letters ghosting through from behind.

Silk is the alternative, and for a photography book it's the right call, since its smooth coating keeps images crisp. In a text led large print book that gentle sheen catches the light at precisely the angle a reader tilts the page. A family history full of old photographs is a genuine trade off, and our guide on how to create and print a hardback photography book covers the image side. For most large print editions the words matter more, so uncoated wins.

Black on white is the strongest pairing, UKAAF says, though some readers find a pale tint easier, and it mentions a 10 to 15% tint such as pale yellow for cutting glare. UKAAF also asks for a non glossy cover, so pick a matt laminated case over gloss. Our free paper samples let you hold each option under your own lamp.

Large type multiplies the page count, and the spine has to follow

Raise the type from 11 point to 18 point and each line holds fewer words while each page holds fewer lines, and those two losses multiply. As rough arithmetic, 18 point is about 1.6 times 11 point in each direction, and 1.6 squared is roughly 2.6, so a 200 page novel could run past 500 pages in large print. UKAAF simply warns that a large print version will be a significantly larger document than the original.

Page count then chooses the binding for you. A stapled booklet copes with a page count between 8 and 72, provided it divides by four, which suits a short large print order of service. A glued paperback (perfect binding) needs a minimum of 32 inside pages, giving a 3mm spine, and you want about 5mm before a title fits along it. A hardback can be made from as few as 28 inside pages, and its spine measures 9mm even then, so a slim large print hardback still has room for its title on the back. Our book spine sizes page tells you the width to design the cover around, and our guide to hardcover printing prices shows how extra pages move the bill.

A hardback copes with a heavy large print book far better than a paperback

A large print book running to hundreds of pages gets heavy, and heavy books are handled hard: lifted one handed and passed round a reading group. Rigid boards shield the corners and page edges, and a case bound hardback holds its shape where a thick paperback tends to bow and crease down its spine.

The bigger reason is how it opens. On a case bound book the spine of the cover isn't glued to the back of the pages, so the page block flexes freely and stays open on a table. UKAAF asks for large print to be bound so it lies flat, partly because many readers with low vision use a handheld or video magnifier and need the page flat beneath it. A fat glued paperback fights back and snaps shut.

The honest alternative is a softback, lighter and cheaper, and our softback coffee table book video shows how good one can look. For a slim book read once and passed on, softback is fine. For a long book a whole family will reach for over the years, hardback wins. Some publishers pair a standard edition with a large print hardback, and we've produced limited edition sets where the packaging mattered as much as the contents.

Build the large print file from scratch instead of scaling up the PDF

The tempting shortcut is to take your finished A5 PDF and print it at A4. Resist it. A4 is only 141% of A5, so 11 point body text comes out at about 15.5 point, still below UKAAF's 16 point minimum, with every small caption swollen along with it. UKAAF warns that simply enlarging may not raise the type enough and fixes none of the other problems.

Reflow the text in your layout software using paragraph styles, so one change to the body style resizes the whole book; UKAAF recommends templates and styles for exactly this job. Then work through this checklist:

• Body text at 16 point or more, ideally 18, with captions, footnotes and page numbers matching it.
• Page numbers in the bottom outer corner, as UKAAF suggests.
• Left aligned text, justification and automatic hyphenation off, no widows or orphans.
• A generous inner margin. Our rule for perfect bound books is a 12mm gap, at minimum, between the spine and anything a reader needs, and a large print hardback deserves no less.
• 3mm of bleed wherever the page gets trimmed.
• Pages exported one by one, first to last as a reader meets them, not as printer spreads; arranging them for the press is our job.
• The point size printed on the cover, as UKAAF recommends, since many readers don't know which size suits them and a stated size gives them a starting point.

If typesetting a few hundred pages at 18 point sounds like a long weekend you'd rather skip, our list of agencies that design books for print is where to find help. Big type helps any book read at a distance, too, like a printed recipe book propped open on the worktop.

A test copy settles the type size before the full run

Screens are hopeless judges of print size. Eighteen point on a zoomed monitor tells you nothing about 18 point on paper at reading distance. That's why we'll happily print one copy on its own first, a test you (and ideally the person it's for) can hold under a familiar lamp to judge the type size in the hand. A member of our team also looks over every file by eye before anything prints.

When you're ready, start on our hardback book printing page. Tell us the point size you've settled on and who the book is for, and we'll help you make one your readers can enjoy without hunting for their glasses.