![]() A well-known authority on typography writes: First, they are believed to increase letter discriminability by making the spatial code of letter forms more complex. ![]() There are two main reasons cited to explain why serifs should enhance legibility. In the typographic literature, serifs are generally believed to have a significant impact on readability. Given the small sample size, however, we cannot draw firm or general conclusions about low vision from these data. Since illegible typography appears to be a common complaint among people with impaired vision, we also included two readers with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in our sample of subjects. To be able to draw firmer conclusions, we used fonts of our own design that differ only in the presence or absence, and size of serifs. In the present study, we address the issue of how the presence or absence of serifs contributes to readability both at typical print sizes and close to the acuity limit. Indeed, most studies assessing the impact of font characteristics that use pre-existing fonts have difficulty drawing definitive conclusions since virtually all such fonts differ in more than a single characteristic (e.g., Mansfield et al., 1996 Yager, Aquilante, & Plass, 1998). One reason for the paucity of research in this area is that it is only since the advent of computer fonts that it has it been reasonably easy to construct fonts that can be varied parametrically. So one typeface with 19 styles makes for a very versatile tool.It is well accepted that typeface affects text readability (Mackeben, 1999 Mansfield, Legge, & Bane, 1996 Roethlein, 1912 Tinker, 1963 Whittaker, Rohrkaste, & Higgins, 1989), but apart from a few studies ( Arditi, 1996 Arditi, Cagenello, & Jacobs, 1995a, Arditi, Cagenello, & Jacobs, 1995b Arditi, Knoblauch, & Grunwald, 1990 Arditi, Liu, & Lynn, 1997 Berger, 1944a, 1944b, 1948) few experiments have addressed how carefully controlled, specific characteristics of font design contribute to legibility. (I’m not going to link here because I’ve seen different prices on various websites and as part of packages, so the advice is shop around for your fonts.) As well as the “regular” or medium font Futura has the following. For example, I’m a big fan of the Futura font. It can worth buying a couple of good sans serif fonts for your library. Some of the professional or commercial font families come in a variety of weights and styles. The look pretty similar don’t they? Helvetica and Geneva come with Macs, while Arial, Tahoma and Verdana come with Windows. You probably already have several sans serif typefaces on your computer. They are not quite as legible in print, so are used in headings, pull quotes and small tracts of text in magazines, books and brochures. Sans serif fonts are considered to be easy to read from a screen and so are very suitable for body text on web sites. And of course, there are no serifs anywhere. The characteristics which distinguish sans serif typefaces are that they are nearly always “monoweight.” This means that there no thick/thin transition in the strokes, they are the same thickness the whole way around. The first experiments with printed sans serif typefaces was in the mid 1700s, however their use in print really didn’t become more commonplace until the early 1800s. The fonts that fall into this category are most commonly known as sans serif but you might also see them referred to as Grotesque, Doric and Gothic (not to be confused with the Blackletter typeface). If you studied French, you will know that “sans” means “without,” so naturally enough, sans serif fonts are those without serifs at the end of the strokes. That is, their letter forms have a serif on the end of the stroke. All three of these font categories cover fonts that are described as Serif typefaces. Over the past few weeks I’ve put up posts about Old Style, Modern and Slab Serif typefaces.
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