I do not dispute the fact that person with low or impaired vision may
well benefit fro a a san-seriffed typeface. That may well be the case
which is why I promote the idea of the user being able to select the
type of face best suited for him or her.
Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mar 22, 2008, at 6:19 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
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
