Re: Font Question, Multi use document

["D. Margulis" <ampersandvirgule -at- WORLDNET -dot- ATT -dot- NET>]

Damien and all,

Most readability studies conducted in the past involved skilled
typographers, skilled compositors, hot metal, and good presswork. The
results of those studies are not particularly meaningful when readers
are looking at low-resolution text, either output from a 300 or 600 dpi
laser printer or viewed on a 72-100 dpi monitor.

_Some_ serif fonts survive this abuse quite well; in fact many newer
fonts are designed specifically for this environment. In general,
though, more sans serif faces hold up in this environment than serif
faces. (And, of course, font size is a crucial variable in all this.)

So it is not unreasonable to believe your experimental results. The
change has not been so much the tastes of the reading public as it has
been the medium in which we publish. If you have the opportunity to
produce a book that will be output on a high-resolution device and
printed on a commercial press, don't assume that your in-office test
results will still be valid, though.

Dick

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
>