A variety of fonts are permitted in APA Style papers. Font options include the following:
- sans serif fonts such as 11-point Calibri, 11-point Arial, or 10-point Lucida Sans Unicode
- serif fonts such as 12-point Times New Roman, 11-point Georgia, or normal (10-point) Computer Modern (the default font for LaTeX)
APA recommend these fonts because they are legible and widely available and because they include special characters such as math symbols and Greek letters.
Use the same font throughout your paper, with the following exceptions:
- figures: Within figure images, use a sans serif font with a type size between 8 and 14 points.
- computer code: To present computer code, use a monospace font such as 10-point Lucida Console or 10-point Courier New.
- footnotes: When inserting footnotes with the footnotes function of your word-processing program, use the default font settings. The footnote font might be smaller than the text font (and have different line spacing), and it is not necessary to change it.
To determine paper length, instructors may have different specifications. Since different fonts occupy varying amounts of space on a page, it is advisable to use word count instead of page count as a more accurate measure.