Greg Kearney wrote:
Further it is a long held typographic principle that body copy of books
and similar material should be set in serif type to aid readability. To
prove this to your self go to a library or bookstore and attempt to find
a book not set in a seriffed face.
Yes, but the particular word shape recognition theory you put forward
isn't the only possible explanation for serif's body text dominance. For
example, familiarity and conservatism might be contributing factors.
As a student of typography I was
taught that sans-serif faces were for signs, captions and short papers
such as websites but for body copy such as books magazines and
newspapers serifs help the normal sighted reader by making the word's
shape stand out relative to the others. One research paper,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2005.06.013 would hardly vacate 500
years of typographic practice.
Weren't German body text still frequently using Blackletter typefaces,
rather than humanist serifs, in the early twentieth century?
I don't have a typographical training, but I'd tend to put more faith in
empirical evidence than theory or tradition in any field. So on the
contrary, I feel one paper could indeed negate hundreds, or even
thousands, of years of thought and practice. It would need to be very
sound though, and there might be methodological problems with the study
in question:
http://blog.fawny.org/2007/09/12/atypi-bessemans/
I don't have access to the study itself, and wouldn't have sufficient
expertise to properly assess it, so I can't really comment on that.
However, my layman's impression based on discussions like the following
was that the relative legibility of sans-serif and serif is a
contentious issue in vision research well beyond that particular study:
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/typography-and-the-aging-eye
http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography#Readability_and_legibility
As to the legal issue surrounding the use of the @font-face they are
well taken and I will make note of them. Interesting, isn't it how Apple
always seems to get out in front of the law on things like this?
I'm not sure. Isn't that a bit like saying Microsoft is in front of the
law because Internet Explorer allows you to distribute and download
pirated music? @font-face is unproblematic for fonts which one has a
legal right to redistribute, e.g. your own fonts, public domain fonts,
and free and open source fonts.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
