When reading text on the screen, the choice of the font used is important. If it's too small, people may have to wear glasses to read it. Furthermore, with a small font, a lot of information can be put on a single page, which can reduce readability, too. On the other hand, choosing a font too big may need the user to scroll too much, which will be a burden when reading long texts, too. Therefore, one should be careful to use any extreme, and not use a certain size just because it fits the converter or it's default.
The main goal to maintain and remember is readbility, taking the most common settings into consideration that the user of a document viewer can tune.
Besides giving general rules, some document formats need special attention for fonts.
When converting TEX-documents into PDF (via DVI and PostScript), one should try to replace the pixel-fonts TEX uses into PostScript fonts, as these are clearer to read and faster to display on screen (see discussion on TEX above on how to achive this). Furthermore, when printing, the document is more resolution independent of the output device.
When converting into PDF, one should also choose a font size that would be ok for printing, too. Just because a PDF reader provides the facility to zoom into every word, the page might still get too crowded with a small font.
When converting into HTML, this problem isn't really there, since the user of the document can set the font size via his browser, so he can adjust it so it fits his reading abilities. However, even here there are two points that should be remembered. When using images with text in them, e.g. as in many technical drawings etc., the size of that font can not be chanced any more, as it's part of the images. Care must be taken so that this font is displayed ok, too. Second, when using frames, these are usually specified in fixed relations relative to the window size. When very small frames are used, e.g. for a navigation bar or page header/footer, it's possible text (or even worse, links) get scrolled outside of the visible area of the frame when the user has chosen a very big font. It's usually better to use some kind of tables for these purposes as they are font sensitive, in contrast to frames.
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