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Subject:Re: Favorite/Recommended Fonts From:"Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- JAEDWORKS -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:19:13 -0700
At 5:30 PM -0700 4/6/99, Peter Martin wrote:
>The reading research I've read doesn't support that view. (See Wheildon's
>"Text and Layout"). Wheildon's research (repeatable: anyone want to
>try it out with proper controls and statistics ?) shows good comprehension
>levels dropped from 67% for serif fonts to 12% for sans serif on this
>group tests..
Which serif and sans serif fonts, and for what medium? It's an easy guess
that typeset Palatino on paper will be more readable than typeset Helvetica
on paper...but I wouldn't take that as saying anything useful about the
readability of a slab serif font vis-a-vis Optima on paper, or the
readability of anything on screen.
I've been able to find very little research on this subject, and most has
been extremely limited in scope. I'm not too keen on generalizing from
"Helvetica" to "sans serif fonts". Nor from results on paper to results on
glass. Nor from comprehension results for running text to readability
results for *all* text; comprehension and retention are also important for
callouts and headings, to take two examples, but the physical and
psychological mechanisms are very different from those used for reading
paragraphs of prose for comprehension.
