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Subject:Re: Font Question, Multi use document From:Mark Dempsey <mxd2 -at- OSI -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 28 Jul 1998 08:14:50 -0700
Damien's post reminded me of what happened to people with congenital
cataracts when they first discovered the operation restoring their
physical ability to see. Oddly enough, although there were no physical
barriers to sight, these patients still could not see in the usual sense
of the word once the obstructing cataracts were removed. They had to be
taught to see. They literally could not distinguish between a triangle
and a circle until they were taught to make their gaze trace the
outlines of these figures as their fingers had when they were blind.
The points of the triangle then made an impression, and they were able
to really see the difference between it and the smooth circle.
It's my personal theory that the serifs provide a similar function to
readers, helping them distinguish letters, but I have performed no
experiment to confirm this. Nevertheless, you'll have to look through
the library very hard to find a book printed in sans-serif type, so
there must be something to that conclusion. If the printing is
low-resolution, or if that font appears onscreen, then the serifs become
muddied, and are not as useful.
Incidentally, the patients who became sighted found it an annoyance.
For this and other strange stories, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
"Phenomenology of Perception"
...I knew that college philosophy class would come in handy sometime....
Regards,
Damien Braniff wrote:
>
> We too are looking at our current documents and how they can be improved -
> layout, fonts, etc. Some time ago I did a little in-house experiment and
> printed out a paragraph of text in a variety of fonts and circulated it for
> opinion. Contrary to research that serif fonts are easier to read the most
> popular fonts were sans serif like arial (what we currently use). It was
> suggested that a paragraph wasn't enough text to get a fair response - a
> para of one font may be easy to read but a whole page... I'm currently
> repeating the process with more text and initial results again show that
> people prefer the sans serif fonts. I know this is just a small straw poll
> but has anyone else come across this or is it just an aberration?
>
> Damien Braniff
> Technical Author
> PAC International
-- mailto:Mark -dot- Dempsey -at- osi -dot- com
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-- Mark Dempsey
-- Technical Publications
-- Objective Systems Integrators
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