Paul Stenquist <[email protected]> wrote: >Back in the days when I worked for Hearst, it was considered gospel >that serifs were easier to read. If you look through a lot of pubs >today, you'll see most use serifs for body copy. Personally, I find >a standard serif font like times or garamond to be easier to read >that san serifs. That may be just a matter of what I'm accustomed to.
It's still taken as gospel in a lot of places but there's precious little evidence to back it up. The main line of thinking is that serifs make it easier to distinguish between, say, an upper case "I", a lower case "l" and the numeral "1". In some typefaces these are virtually identical and can only be worked out by context within the word or sentence in which they're used. This is done unconsciously almost instantaneously but it believed to make reading more fatiguing. In actual practice things like leading, x-height and counter size play a large role as well. Possibly as big or bigger than the presence of serifs, but it's impossible to tell for certain. After all, it's not as if you can compare fonts that are identical in every way except for the presence of serifs! (Even if you created such a pair of typefaces they wouldn't be ones that are used anywhere outside your experiment.) Screen vs. print likely makes a difference, as does screen size and resolution. But if some people find your sans-serif body text hard to read it's probably a good idea to try something else, even it it's a different sans-serif typeface. I only find sans-serif bothersome for really large amounts of text like newspapers, magazines or books. Since the usual recommendation for web writing is 1500 words or fewer for an article, I don't mind sans-serif there unless it's a weird font, too small or with cramped leading. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
