Textbooks used in middle and elementary schools have been concentrated on the knowledge in distinct disciplines. The design of layout and font type used in these textbooks has not attracted sufficient discussions. Ministry of Education has stipulated regulations on graphic standards of textbooks, including font types used in textbooks circulated in middle and elementary schools. Although these regulations suggest that using “Microsoft Standard Kai Font” in textbooks could cultivate students’ knowledge regarding the (order of) strokes of vocabulary, such regulations have also been criticized for causing the boredom and lack of beauty of textbooks. Is it true that we could not have the beauty of textbook design and the content of academic knowledge at the same time? This study takes the choice of font types as a point of departure to compare and contrast the relationships between different font types (“Microsoft Standard Kai Font” and “Microsoft JhengHei”) and students’ performance on reading comprehension. Through interviewing art editors in textbooks publishers and middle school teachers, this study also collects various opinions on layouts and font types of textbooks. This study, according to research results, further gives suggestions on the combinations of font types in textbooks by comparing students’ performance of reading comprehension under different designs of experiments with reading materials presented in distinct formats.
