Spent another hour testing, I'm leaning towards Georgia now. Garamond is actually really difficult to read on screen and in print. I don't know why people have recommended it. I think it may work for a history phd thesis, where you want to go for that historical look.

I used blue. I changed it to a darker blue than the default Word uses though.

I printed mine 'free' at the department too - although a few months after I left, my supervisor emailed to ask me why my printing costs were so high!

The single font suggestion is nothing more than a personal preference. I think that having two or more fonts distracts the reader. Over the years, I have come to favour simplicity as I think this makes it easier for the reader to focus on a single message - the thesis argument. I look forward to seeing your thesis if you use two or more fonts - as I love to see creative flair! I hope this link helps below. I am only trying to make the point to be sure as a minimum to follow university regulations. For issues such as fonts and font sizes the examiner rarely knows what the actual guidelines are. If you breach them, you will most likely be asked to correct them by the Faculty Manager or librarian after you have passed your doc exam and submit your final manuscript for archiving.

Most universities have an official guideline such as:

https://research.unsw.edu.au/document/thesis_format_guide.pdf

Fonts are discussed in this example. This example mandates minimum font sizes but leaves choices of font/s open.

I wish you well. Jay

Thanks tree of life and Jay. As I said earlier, there's no font guidelines nor font size.

I use the same colour but less 'intense' - not sure the technical term but I basically reduce the saturation to about 75%

If you go to Tools->Fonts and then select the Advanced tab there are some Advanced Options. To change the number baselines select Lining from the Number Forms option. It doesn't work for all fonts, e.g. Georgia, unfortunately. But does work for Constantia. After uhming and ahing I've gone back to Georgia actually. The stats are more readable, even if the numbers aren't all with the same baseline.

I'm using Word for Mac, but expect it would be in a similar place on Windows.

I'm sure it'll be fine. They're not going to fail you because they don't like the font :-) But, I understand your concern, I am the same about formatting!

I'm using 11 point and I've set line spacing to exactly 22pt rather than using 1.5 spacing - my reasoning for this is that I've got a fair few subscripts and postscripts (bloody stats) and they make the spacing inconsistent if you use 1.5 rather than a fixed pt value.