If you're self-publishing an ePub or Kindle book, the user can change the font and the other coloring won't show up. A PDF or hard copy, however, will retain all of the features.
But manuscript format is not meant to imitate book format--not at all. It's specifically NOT supposed to look like a book. You shouldn't be trying to imitate books. Your example is indeed very far away from industry standards for a manuscript. Some people in this thread have offered you some manuscript standards. That, not published books, is what you should be looking at. A book is intended to serve the needs of a bookseller and a reader. A manuscript is intended to serve the needs of an agent or a publisher. Those are very different things. A manuscript is a very, very plain presentation of the words. It's double-spaced, so that comments and corrections can be scribbled on it. It has specific information on each page, for the convenience of the person reading it. Other aspects have other practical reasons that are intended to serve the situation of the agent, publisher, editor, etc. A manuscript should not, absolutely should not, totally should not, look like a book.
I'm lost now. Earlier, you said: I assumed that this meant that you would be submitting this manuscript to an editor or literary agent. You won't be? This is all for self-publishing?
As for me, picking too fancy font could damage the reader's experience. Who wants to spend a lot of time trying to guess is that letter "m" or "n"? Caslon and Palatino are both give delight to my eyes.
Having done both manuscript submissions: stick to the guidelines, and use ragged right. Then going through CreateSpace, their template recommended 11pt Garamond for my full length, which looked nice. My editor gave me high praise, wondering how much I paid for the very nice interior layout (I did it all myself). Shameless plug, look inside my latest to see how that worked out
My apologies, the Kindle layout does not do justice to the paper layout. The graphics are on the opposite side, and the text doesn't flow around them.
You're right, and in fact I finally settled on Adobe Caslon Pro. Thankfully I'm an Adobe Creative Cloud user and that's one of the fonts they allow you to download for free.
That's a nice look! I love Garamond, except for the damn numbers which bounce up and down... also, I'm not found of the 'W' crossing in the middle. The Tilde Font Foundry does make a very nice Garamond, called 'Elegant Garamond', with cleaned up numbers, nice italics, and a proper 'W'. I will probably end up using the font... it is expensive though, $79 for each font style!
