The Grammar Puss blog is still obsessed (as many of us are) with the new format the Guardian will appear in on Monday.

She has a link to PDF of a trial edition’s front page.

Like many people, I have some reservations about having headlines in a serif font, but then I am very old-fashioned and traditional about such things – body in serif, heading in sans. I don’t mind the new font when it is used for the body though, except for one thing: the lower case i has its dot offset a little to the right. Its a bit of an annoyance.

Having said that, we will probably get used to it quickly and before long will even grow attached to it. The whole thing is a bold move for a paper with such a large proportion of its readership being interested in design.

I’m not so sure about the size though, and not for the sort of snobbish reasons that led some lifelong readers of the Times to abandon the paper rather than be seen reading a tabloid. I am just not sure it is small enough.

But I am looking at it from the specific and narrow perspective of a regular railway communter. I never read the Guardian on the train, preferring to nap, but I do sometimes find myself having to fight for space with acres of newsprint belonging to people who do not have the mental capacity to keep themselves amused/engaged/occupied without reading, even on the short stand-up sardine journey between Clapham Junction and Waterloo.

I think I would prefer all broadsheets to reduce to tabloid size. I would have that enforced by the same law which banned umbrellas and forced the un-invention of mobile phones.