When Fonts Fight, Times New Roman Conquers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Times has some objective merits, bland and ugly as it is. It is somewhat readable on screen due to hinting. It's available in Office and used to be the default, and many people won't even look for other Office fonts. If they did, they'd find that Georgia rules the 'works on any resolution + paper' category. Another (non-Office) solution is FOSS favorite Bitstream Charter (I suggest a variant called XCharter for better Unicode coverage). Both Georgia and Charter were designed by Matthew Carter.
If you have a high-dpi screen and a 1200dpi printer, you may as well use Garamond. Minion (or FOSS-licenced Cochineal) are a bit plainer. Linux Libertine is quite nice. If I wrote in a WYSIWYG editor, I'd probably still use Charter, because it's even simpler and cleaner, and print something else. These 'nice' serifs may provide some inspiration with their sheer beauty, but I find looking at them on a screen tiring and prefer the simplicity of Charter.
When it comes to sans-serifs, fortunately Arial isn't on the list. Both Arial and Helvetica are shitty choices for copy, Univers being just slightly better (wider spaced and easier to read) but still shit. Even Calibri reads significantly easier than all of them neo-grotesques.
Frutiger (and its near-clone Myriad) reads much easier on screen and in print. Syntax looks stylish on paper but crappy on screen, and same can be said of FF Meta (I blame the angled terminals on some letters). Fira Sans (Meta derivate) looks great on screen and on paper. If i had to use a sans-serif in a WYSIWYG editor, I'd pick Fira or Frutiger.
However, since I only write LaTeX and (Pandoc) Markdown (both in Vim), I write in Terminus or Inconsolata LGC, depending on screen resolution.