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The Serif/Sans readability question ignores too many important
variables.
Which font family? How big are the serifs? On screen or paper? How long
are the paragraphs? Is bold or italic text used for emphasis, and how
much? What resolution? What degree of contrast? What about tables?
Some things I've heard, although I haven't seen the research:
1) Serif fonts are more readable than they used to be. The earlier
research pitted less well developed sans-serif against sophisticated
serifs, more recent research shows less difference.
2) Sans serif is usualy more readable than serif on a screen (My
experience suggests this is correct).
The practical answer is: look at all the available options, and don't
rule out combinations that work. I do tend to end up using serif for
body text and sans for everything else, on paper. But not always.
Personaly, I like a nice uncial with very light serifs, and a heavy
black letter for headings, but that's kind of hard to sell in a
technical document. And you have to go into some fairly extreme custom
drop caps to make the page work.
Mike Huber
mike -dot- huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dianne Walsh [SMTP:ldwalsh -at- VOICENET -dot- COM]
>Sent: Thursday, July 24, 1997 10:31 AM
>To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
>Subject: sans serif fonts
>
> Buck wrote: the argument for sans serif fonts is indefensible.
>
>Well, here's a defense:
>
>My company publishes some of its smaller manuals as booklets; i.e., pages are
>set up in Word at full size and then we use a print utility to literally
>"shrink" them to half-size. It didn't take us long to find out that serif
>fonts looked terrible and were virtually unreadable when reduced. We got much
>better--and more readable--results using a sans serif font (good ol' Arial).
>
>Someone else--I think it was Pat Gantt--said that she had understood that
>research showed sans serif fonts to be more readable. I've read that too,
>somewhere. She wasn't making it up.
>_________________________________________________________________________
>Dianne Walsh
>documentation Manager
>
>Visit the Last of the Red Hot Cybermamas at http://www.voicenet.com/~ldwalsh
>_________________________________________________________________________
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