> [T]he overwhelming thrust of the available evidence is
that there is no difference in the legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces either when reading from paper or when reading from screens. Typographers and software designers should feel able to make full use of both serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces, even if legibility is a key criterion in their choice.
Interesting! Does it touch on why people initially became so opinionated about serif/sans readability? And what’s a meaningful characteristic if not serifs?
- serif was claimed to lead to better horizontal tracking... so better for long prose readability
- sans serif was claimed to lead to better spot-recognition of characters... so better for spot-character/word recognition and legibility
Those effects were never very strong, and varied depending on the exact fonts in use (and for digital, font rendering characteristics).
There's also probably an effect based on what you're used to. If most of the books you read are serif (which they would be for older people, since almost all printed books were serif), and your exposure to sans serif was largely via the internet, and you don't like most of what's written on the internet, that might sway you toward serif. Conversely, if you mostly read modern internet text, you might have the opposite bias.
I can confirm the later effect; prior to the internet, my primary exposure to sans serif fonts were government documents and forms, and advertisements, neither of which inculcated an association with any virtues.
Perhaps you should compare government documents and forms from different governments. UK government forms are extraordinarily beautiful, and welcoming, and are easy to fill out. US government forms, on the other hand, seem almost calculated to be unfriendly, and are incredibly difficult to fill out even when you use supporting instructions. It almost seems like they have been deliberately designed so that they cannot be filled out without the assistance of a lawyer. Canadian forms seem pretty neutral, and practical, but are nowhere near as pleasant to fill out as UK forms are.
Most of those 160 pages, is repetitive mish mash of various historical research (many of questionable quality) on typeface readability loosely grouped by certain themes retold in a way that makes it even less clear about their results, quality and whether testing conditions are useful for making any good conclusions.
Little value in reading it all unless you follow references and read what the quoted research actually did and said. The chapters have different thematic, but content and conclusions are very samey -> a bunch of questionable research and research which was inconclusive or didn't observe significant overall advantage of serif vs sans serif.
As for where it came from to me it very much feels like the defense of serif typefaces is largely typographers defending existence of their craft and people talking past each other with overgeneralized claims. There is definitely value in the art and craft of typography and I respect that. It would be too bland if everything used plain sans serif fonts that barely differ from each other, and you can definitely mess up typography making text hard to read when done badly. But I also believe that there is plenty of things based on traditions and "everyone knows x because that's how we have always done it".
As for sans serif for screens the obvious reason and also thing that comes up multiple times is low resolution text. At certain resolution there are simply not enough pixels for serifs. The author of paper suggest that with modern high resolution screens this argument doesn't stand.
My personal opinion is that it's not a big issue at sufficiently high text size. But even on somewhat modern 2560x1440 screen I can find plenty of UI elements that have only 7-8 pixels high labels. Not everyone is using retina displays and not everything is long format text. Screen resolutions have increased, but so have information density compared to early computer screens, although there is recent trend of simplifying UI to the point of dumbing it down and adding excessive padding all over the place.
There are other screens beside computers and mobile phones, many of them not very high resolution even by standards of early computer screens. It doesn't make sense to put high resolution screen and Linux computer in every little thing. Problem is made worse by lack of antialised text sometimes due to screen, sometimes MCU memory and compute limitations. You are probably not going to have modern font rendering stack on something like black and white washing machine screen, gas station pump or thermostat
The research multiple times mentioned stuff like low resolution, but it hardly ever quoted hard numbers in a meaningful way. How many pixels a typeface needs to be comfortably represent serif? How many arcseconds? Surely there must be research related to that one. This might be part of problem for some comparative research - can't compare readability of serif/sans serif if there is no serif typeface at those resolution. Stuff like point 10 or point 12 without additional details is meaningless.
Some personal anecdote -> text antialising has huge effect. Made a sample text of serif and sans serif font and zoomed out to the point where lower case letters are ~6px high. I wouldn't expect there to be enough resolution for serif but you can perceive surprising amount of detail in letter shapes. Zoomed in on screenshot it's a blurry mess, but at normal zoom level the serif letters are fine. It's readable but wouldn't consider either of 2 comfortable. When scaled up to 8px both pieces were still harder to read than same height text in UI labels. Why is that? Why is one identical height sans serif text much more readable than other? Are UI labels better pixel aligned? Is it due to subpixel antialising? That's on a 90deg rotated screen, is subpixel antialising even working properly there?
Just for fun switch OS UI font to serif. Due to font sizing inconsistency it ended up being 1 pixel shorter (7px) than same size default UI font. Can those even be considered serifs when they are hardly a pixel each? It felt weird, nowhere near as bad I expected, but still weird.
On both cases it is based on some evidence even if they are completely different (one is a question of definition, another of measurement and observation): for Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit; for serif vs non-serif, argument is that serifs help with line tracking for eyes depending on the line spacing and line length.
For a meta-study finding a different result, it'd be great to qualify how was the previous research wrong so we learn something from it.
I've marked as something to pick up as I am very curious.
Thank you, as much as a 160 page book about fonts is probably thrilling, I probably won’t get around to it for a while so was going to ask for the tl;dr
There is no compelling evidence that san-serif fonts are less readable than serif fonts under any circumstance, despite the oft-repeated lore that typographers consider serif fonts to be more readable than sans-serif fonts.
I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually copy for whatever reason. Does the article address this in any way? Or is the context limited to "real" language where that's not as much of an issue?
That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
Some sans-serif fonts do add little flourishes to some letters, like 'l', to further distinguish them.
Not for me. The font we are all seeing depends on our browser and whether we have the requested fonts. No bars on the sans serif my Firefox on Android is displaying.
According to the CSS, this site requests the fonts Verdana or Geneva in order, and what you say about the capital 'I' is true for the former but not the latter.
> That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
I'm not sure if my browser is broken or what but they literally look identical to me in your comment.
One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show password"), at least as of MacOS Monterey 12.1. I also see them as almost identical in my browser's URL bar (Firefox 148.0.2 on aforesaid version of OSX) which isn't just an annoyance but might even be a security concern!
And that's the argument for serif. If you set sans serif the OS may pick one or another font, and that choice may change over time.
By publishing with serif you are guaranteed there will be a clearer distinction.
But txet is contxtual you can evn miss letres entrly yet be lgibl.
The over a hundred page long research paper makes conclusion off a practical study, not encumbered by intuitive clues that typically make us think serif lead to more legibility.
This might be a question of philosophy! I suspect that they were originally serifs - see inscriptions to Julius Caesar, say (such inscriptions being the inspiration for Trajan font) - but for some writers they were extended to become part of the letter body, akin to the bar on the top of capital-T.
My take then is, originally they were serifs, now they are sometimes part of the letter form.
It's surprisingly rare for fonts to be careful to distinguish not just Il1| but also 0O 2Z "'' 5S B8. I typically set my system font to something that does, like Atkinson hyperlegible.
I have only scanned the contents of Part 1 (reading from paper) and read chapter 6 quickly, because that is the only chapter that considers the issue of the layout of the printed material.
My interest in this question is mainly in presenting short paragraphs of text in paper worksheets and handouts for teaching. Teacher training courses tend to echo the 'sans for dyslexics' notion but in addition suggest the use of headings with space before and after and the use of bullet points to break up material, the use of right-ragged (for LTR languages) so that inter-word spacing remains constant, and the use of line spacing chosen so that the space between the lines is a bit longer than the spacing between the words. The choice of typeface is seen as being a bit less important (as long as it is consistent within the handout) given that secondary school children will be familiar with a range of type faces.
Now I'm trying to find some kind of reference for this view about presentation of the page. If anyone has any ideas that would be ace.
I recently discovered Practical Typography [1] and Typography for Lawyers [2] by Matthew Butterick which have changed the way I've approached presenting information. I would highly recommend each for anyone who uses text to communicate. Butterick is a Tufte for text.
Butterick introduced me to Bitstream Charter for which I'm very greatful. However, I would very strongly urge people to disregard his recommendations for representing hyperlinks.
Instead of just underlining hyperlinks, he has this demented nonsense:
> Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
> Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so.
Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.
All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."
Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.
Uppercase doesn't distort shapes, they're just the uppercase shapes. Reading in all-uppercase is a basic skill that you quickly learn, since it's extremely common in signs, titles, etc.
I can understand that learning separate letters for lowercase and uppercase is something that students coming from other writing systems have to learn, the same way I had to learn both uppercase and lowercase in Greek.
But it's just a year-one skill you have to learn. You learn it, fairly quickly, and then you're fine. It's not a reason to avoid using small caps. Generally speaking, by the time your English skills are good enough to read an average paragraph, text in all-uppercase has not been a problem for you for a long time. Vocabulary is the thing that takes a long time to learn, not recognizing words in uppercase.
So while I don't doubt that your ex was telling the truth about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that was just a personal annoyance of hers. It's not a widespread problem. But everybody winds up having their own idiosyncratic annoyances with foreign languages.
It is kinda funny you recommend those books as a reaction to the linked book.
> Nowadays, we expect such matters to be determined by empirical evidence, not by majority opinion. This book is concerned with the empirical evidence concerning the relative legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces
Meanwhile Buttericks books are very much "some guys opinion". Granted, that guy has a big passion, but at the end of the day, his books are not grounded in empirical evidence.
Personally I only care when distinguishing individual letters matters. So things like paths, URIs, passwords, math, & email addresses should be in a font with as few 'confusable' letters as possible. E.g. variables a & α in an equation should look different, I, 1, & l should look different, 0, o, and O should look different, etc. These are almost always easily distinguishable in serif typefaces, and often indistinguishable in sans-serif typefaces, so I tend to prefer using serif typefaces as a default fallback. But it's easy enough to find a sans-serif typeface that's also easy to read all the individual letters in, and sans-serif fonts tend to be a bit easier to read at small text sizes, so I use one of those (a customized Iosevka) for most things on my laptop.
Surprisingly, some languages are better read in more specific fonts.
Maybe it's just a matter of familiarity, but I think it's more than that.
Reading hs.fi in their font of choice in Finnish is just fine, but auto-translated to English (in the same font) feels oh so wrong!
P.S.
Reading hacker news in English in HN font of choice is just fine, while the same sentence translated to Finnish (still in HN font) is mostly OK, but a little worse.
My very uneducated opinion is that doubled consonants and vowels are very common in Finnish, and those are better read with more aggressive kerning, something that HN sanf serif doesn't do.
Example:
- lattia on laavaa tallilla
- floor is lava in a garage
Is there a general preference for serifs, or a local style in Finland for this reason?
German certainly has typographic preferences that err toward taller x-heights and narrower forms due to heavy use of portmanteaus. It’d be interesting to know of other language-specific typographic styles too.
A long time ago I was in a motorcycle accident, and spent a month in the ICU, intubated, unable to talk. My wife made a spelling board for me to communicate by pointing at the letters. It took me forever to explain that it had to be sans serif, because it was big plain letters. And now this is telling me it didn't matter!? :-)
I believe you when you say it mattered to you, but:
1. Your experience is likely an outlier--I'm not saying your experience doesn't matter, I'm saying that your experience and experiences like yours are likely not represented significantly in the data.
2. Other people with outlier experiences may have different needs, i.e. an intervention which improves one reader's experience may make another reader's experience worse.
I did some web accessibility work which involved interviewing a number of disabled clients, and the ultimate conclusion was that we needed to make our site colors configurable. One group with visual impairment needed high contrast, while a few clients with sensory issues were unable to use the site for long when high contrast was used because it was overstimulating. The lower-contrast modes also had issues for colorblind clients, although these clients were less common in the user pool.
In typical American corporate fashion, the entire research results were scrapped when a donor wanted us to use color schemes related to our brand, despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from users on our accessibility configurability.
Honestly what seems to matter more than anything, at least to me, is the size of the text, not so much the font face itself.
I keep all my text on my computer cartoonishly large, just because I find it 10x easier to read if I do. Who am I trying to impress? Computer fonts are dynamic for a reason, I don't care if it looks like it's made for a blind person.
One thing goes through my mind on this; why the hell is this so hard for people to just pick individually? We could have built the web and apps differently to just more-or-less work the same as most ebook readers. PICK WHAT YOU LIKE.
My personal experience, if I have to sum it up, would be, “Sans Serif is cleaner and easier for normal reads, such as shorter text, menus, and overall interfaces. Serif for longer reads where I need deeper focus.”
I find serifs distracting and "noisy" regardless of text length. Their modern use restricted to headings, wordmarks, etc. makes more sense to me.
We ended up with sans-serif for body text on the web because it's more legibile on low-res screens. I still can't believe that didn't settle the argument right there and then decades ago. If something is easier to read on those crappy old screens, it's easier to read everywhere.
Not all "sans-serifs" are similar, i.e. they cannot be put in a single class opposed to serifs.
The sans-serifs designed before WWII have evolved towards a maximum simplification of the letter forms, eliminating not only the serifs, but also the contrast between thin lines and thick lines and also some other details of the shapes that differentiate the letters. The extreme simplification was achieved in some of the "geometric" sans-serifs, where most of the letter shapes were simplified into circles and straight lines. The motivation for shape simplification was that in the beginning the sans serifs were intended for advertising, i.e. for printing on cheap paper with cheap devices, which could not reproduce fine details. More over such texts were intended to be readable from great distances, from where fine details cannot be perceived.
After WWII, some sans-serifs have just reproduced with negligible changes some of the earlier sans-serifs, e.g. Helvetica and the like.
Most of these sans-serifs, like Arial, are extremely bad for use in computers, because they have a lot of ambiguous letters and digits. That mattered less for English texts, which have high redundancy, allowing the guessing of the intended letters, but in computers there are a lot of abbreviations, keywords, identifiers, expressions and other kinds of character strings with low redundancy, where it may be difficult or impossible to recognize the intended letters or digits.
However, there are also several kinds of very different sans-serifs among those designed after WWII, which attempt to remove the disadvantages of the classic sans-serifs.
One kind is the sans-serifs that have only the goal to remove all ambiguities in letters, digits and other symbols, like most of the monospace typefaces intended for programming.
Another kind, besides removing ambiguity also reintroduces some of the letter shapes from serifs, which have been simplified in the classic sans-serifs, e.g. double-storey "g" and "a", old-style digits, distinct shapes for the italic variant of a font, etc. These slightly more complex shapes increase the distinctness of the letters and digits, making them more easily recognizable. An example of such a typeface is FF Meta.
Finally, there is another kind of sans-serifs that also reintroduces the contrast between thin lines and thick lines. Moreover, among these there are typefaces, e.g. Optima or Palatino Sans, which (on displays with high enough resolution) produce an optical effect similar to serifs, which is achieved not with serifs but by replacing the straight side edges of the lines with slightly concave edges.
In my opinion these kinds of sans-serifs that are intermediate between classic serifs and classic sans-serifs are superior to both classic types, especially for computer use.
Despite being less affected by low screen resolutions, the classic sans-serifs like Helvetica, Arial and many others should never be used for anything, because of their ambiguous glyph shapes.
Serifs have non-ambiguous glyph shapes, but they are heavily distorted at low-screen resolutions or when seen from a distance, so they are also not recommended in many applications.
The good choice is in most cases to use one of the sans-serifs with non-ambiguous glyphs, or for a more beautiful text one of the typefaces inspired by FF Meta or one of those inspired by Optima. For example, my default typeface is Palatino Sans.
Any study about the legibility of serif and sans-serif typefaces that does not include a separate category for non-classic sans serifs is deeply flawed and its results are meaningless.
> i.e. they cannot be put in a single class opposed to serifs.
Not sure I understand you. Are you saying all serif typefaces are similar? There's old style, didone, slab serif. These differ more than the various sans-serif typefaces, which are really all quite similar ;)
The differences between various kinds of serif typefaces, which consist mostly in which is the width ratio between thin lines and thick lines and between serifs and thin lines, and in some small details of how the lines are terminated are much smaller than the difference between classic sans-serifs and some of the post-WWII sans-serifs, which use different shapes for some of the characters.
The differences between various kinds of serifs are hard to see on a low-resolution computer screen. The didone typefaces cannot be rendered correctly on most computer displays at body text sizes, where they are distorted by greatly reducing the contrast between thin lines and thick lines, which can be seen on printed paper.
At small sizes or from a distance one cannot distinguish the various kinds of serif typefaces, except those with slab serifs, where the serifs remain conspicuous. However, the slab serifs frequently look rather identical with a classic sans serif, except that big serifs are attached to the glyphs, whose only advantage it that they may remove some of the ambiguities, which is one of the reasons why many typefaces for programmers use sans-serif shapes for most characters, but slab-serif shapes for a few of them. (The other reason is specific for monospace typefaces, where slab serifs on the narrow characters ensure a more uniform average color of the text, i.e. a less variable ratio between white areas and black areas.)
On the other hand, the differences in character shapes between something like FF Meta or Palatino Sans or JetBrains Mono vs. Helvetica or Arial are extremely obvious and they matter a lot for legibility.
I agree with you that besides classic serifs from before the Napoleonic wars, classic sans-serifs from before WWII and non-classic sans-serifs, in a legibility study one could include a 4th category, slab serif typefaces, which are distinctive enough from older serif typefaces.
However slab serifs do not have any supporters who claim that they are good for anything else than their original purpose, which was for advertising, the same as for sans-serifs. So nothing is lost by not adding them to a legibility study. On the other hand, not considering non-classic sans-serifs is a methodological mistake, because they are frequently more legible than either classic sans-serifs or classic serifs, so omitting them is like organizing a competition only for known losers.
The long conclusion seems to be that all the conventional wisdom on the subject is not borne out by the empirical evidence. So why spend so much time explaining all the the conventional wisdom? I don't need you to tell me about 100 people's opinions just to tell me they're all wrong.
This sounds like a nonsense comparison, no? Surely we can agree that different typefaces have different legibility? And yes, some are serif and some are sans-serif. Also context matters.
Grouping "serif" and grouping "sans-serif" and comparing the groups' legibility is just a stupid undertaking to begin with.
To sum up almost 160 pages:
> [T]he overwhelming thrust of the available evidence is that there is no difference in the legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces either when reading from paper or when reading from screens. Typographers and software designers should feel able to make full use of both serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces, even if legibility is a key criterion in their choice.
Interesting! Does it touch on why people initially became so opinionated about serif/sans readability? And what’s a meaningful characteristic if not serifs?
I realize it’s lazy to just ask, but… 160 pages…
Past studies suggested slight differences:
- serif was claimed to lead to better horizontal tracking... so better for long prose readability
- sans serif was claimed to lead to better spot-recognition of characters... so better for spot-character/word recognition and legibility
Those effects were never very strong, and varied depending on the exact fonts in use (and for digital, font rendering characteristics).
There's also probably an effect based on what you're used to. If most of the books you read are serif (which they would be for older people, since almost all printed books were serif), and your exposure to sans serif was largely via the internet, and you don't like most of what's written on the internet, that might sway you toward serif. Conversely, if you mostly read modern internet text, you might have the opposite bias.
I can confirm the later effect; prior to the internet, my primary exposure to sans serif fonts were government documents and forms, and advertisements, neither of which inculcated an association with any virtues.
Perhaps you should compare government documents and forms from different governments. UK government forms are extraordinarily beautiful, and welcoming, and are easy to fill out. US government forms, on the other hand, seem almost calculated to be unfriendly, and are incredibly difficult to fill out even when you use supporting instructions. It almost seems like they have been deliberately designed so that they cannot be filled out without the assistance of a lawyer. Canadian forms seem pretty neutral, and practical, but are nowhere near as pleasant to fill out as UK forms are.
Most of those 160 pages, is repetitive mish mash of various historical research (many of questionable quality) on typeface readability loosely grouped by certain themes retold in a way that makes it even less clear about their results, quality and whether testing conditions are useful for making any good conclusions. Little value in reading it all unless you follow references and read what the quoted research actually did and said. The chapters have different thematic, but content and conclusions are very samey -> a bunch of questionable research and research which was inconclusive or didn't observe significant overall advantage of serif vs sans serif.
As for where it came from to me it very much feels like the defense of serif typefaces is largely typographers defending existence of their craft and people talking past each other with overgeneralized claims. There is definitely value in the art and craft of typography and I respect that. It would be too bland if everything used plain sans serif fonts that barely differ from each other, and you can definitely mess up typography making text hard to read when done badly. But I also believe that there is plenty of things based on traditions and "everyone knows x because that's how we have always done it".
As for sans serif for screens the obvious reason and also thing that comes up multiple times is low resolution text. At certain resolution there are simply not enough pixels for serifs. The author of paper suggest that with modern high resolution screens this argument doesn't stand. My personal opinion is that it's not a big issue at sufficiently high text size. But even on somewhat modern 2560x1440 screen I can find plenty of UI elements that have only 7-8 pixels high labels. Not everyone is using retina displays and not everything is long format text. Screen resolutions have increased, but so have information density compared to early computer screens, although there is recent trend of simplifying UI to the point of dumbing it down and adding excessive padding all over the place. There are other screens beside computers and mobile phones, many of them not very high resolution even by standards of early computer screens. It doesn't make sense to put high resolution screen and Linux computer in every little thing. Problem is made worse by lack of antialised text sometimes due to screen, sometimes MCU memory and compute limitations. You are probably not going to have modern font rendering stack on something like black and white washing machine screen, gas station pump or thermostat The research multiple times mentioned stuff like low resolution, but it hardly ever quoted hard numbers in a meaningful way. How many pixels a typeface needs to be comfortably represent serif? How many arcseconds? Surely there must be research related to that one. This might be part of problem for some comparative research - can't compare readability of serif/sans serif if there is no serif typeface at those resolution. Stuff like point 10 or point 12 without additional details is meaningless.
Some personal anecdote -> text antialising has huge effect. Made a sample text of serif and sans serif font and zoomed out to the point where lower case letters are ~6px high. I wouldn't expect there to be enough resolution for serif but you can perceive surprising amount of detail in letter shapes. Zoomed in on screenshot it's a blurry mess, but at normal zoom level the serif letters are fine. It's readable but wouldn't consider either of 2 comfortable. When scaled up to 8px both pieces were still harder to read than same height text in UI labels. Why is that? Why is one identical height sans serif text much more readable than other? Are UI labels better pixel aligned? Is it due to subpixel antialising? That's on a 90deg rotated screen, is subpixel antialising even working properly there?
Just for fun switch OS UI font to serif. Due to font sizing inconsistency it ended up being 1 pixel shorter (7px) than same size default UI font. Can those even be considered serifs when they are hardly a pixel each? It felt weird, nowhere near as bad I expected, but still weird.
> Does it touch on why people initially became so opinionated about serif/sans readability?
That's the default state of all questions. It doesn't need to be explained.
Why do you think people had opinions on whether Pluto should be called a "planet"?
On both cases it is based on some evidence even if they are completely different (one is a question of definition, another of measurement and observation): for Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit; for serif vs non-serif, argument is that serifs help with line tracking for eyes depending on the line spacing and line length.
For a meta-study finding a different result, it'd be great to qualify how was the previous research wrong so we learn something from it.
I've marked as something to pick up as I am very curious.
Thank you, as much as a 160 page book about fonts is probably thrilling, I probably won’t get around to it for a while so was going to ask for the tl;dr
There is no compelling evidence that san-serif fonts are less readable than serif fonts under any circumstance, despite the oft-repeated lore that typographers consider serif fonts to be more readable than sans-serif fonts.
If this were Reddit I'd buy you an award. Consider yourself gold-starred.
Wow, my first HN award! Thank you, kind stranger! :-)
we have a HN Peace Award in reserve too, should the orange man land on the orange website
I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually copy for whatever reason. Does the article address this in any way? Or is the context limited to "real" language where that's not as much of an issue?
That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
Some sans-serif fonts do add little flourishes to some letters, like 'l', to further distinguish them.
Not for me. The font we are all seeing depends on our browser and whether we have the requested fonts. No bars on the sans serif my Firefox on Android is displaying.
According to the CSS, this site requests the fonts Verdana or Geneva in order, and what you say about the capital 'I' is true for the former but not the latter.
> That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
I'm not sure if my browser is broken or what but they literally look identical to me in your comment.
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
My computer has neither Verdana nor Geneva, and my browser's default sans-serif is Noto Sans, which has bars on the upper case "I".
Verdana does, too. It looks like Geneva does not (<http://www.identifont.com/show?1O3>), so you're probably using Geneva.
Maybe Verdana is the default for Windows, Geneva for MacOS, and "other" for Linuxes.
One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show password"), at least as of MacOS Monterey 12.1. I also see them as almost identical in my browser's URL bar (Firefox 148.0.2 on aforesaid version of OSX) which isn't just an annoyance but might even be a security concern!
Probably your browser. They look different to me.
Yeah, that was interesting.
I replied to that comment on Kiwi (chromium), android. The two letters were literally identical (I even zoomed in).
On desktop (also chromium)… the difference is obvious. I don't know if it's an android vs windows thing? Or what? But it's definitely something.
And that's the argument for serif. If you set sans serif the OS may pick one or another font, and that choice may change over time.
By publishing with serif you are guaranteed there will be a clearer distinction.
But txet is contxtual you can evn miss letres entrly yet be lgibl.
The over a hundred page long research paper makes conclusion off a practical study, not encumbered by intuitive clues that typically make us think serif lead to more legibility.
Aren't those bars the serifs? So you're saying the sans-serif I has serifs?
Hacker news uses sans-serif font and in all my browsers the I and l look nearly identical btw.
I think the serifs would be embellishments at the ends of the bars, not the bars themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif
This might be a question of philosophy! I suspect that they were originally serifs - see inscriptions to Julius Caesar, say (such inscriptions being the inspiration for Trajan font) - but for some writers they were extended to become part of the letter body, akin to the bar on the top of capital-T.
My take then is, originally they were serifs, now they are sometimes part of the letter form.
Perhaps, a well-designed random password generate should not use 1, l, or I. Or 0, or O. (I know mine don't).
Now I'm imagining an unrealistically-nerdy world where all secret entry/display widgets let you flip between different representations.
So a form might have a choices between ASCII, Hex, Base52, Base64, or schemes with anti-typo check digits, etc.
It's surprisingly rare for fonts to be careful to distinguish not just Il1| but also 0O 2Z "'' 5S B8. I typically set my system font to something that does, like Atkinson hyperlegible.
Thanks for the-mitr for posting this.
I have only scanned the contents of Part 1 (reading from paper) and read chapter 6 quickly, because that is the only chapter that considers the issue of the layout of the printed material.
My interest in this question is mainly in presenting short paragraphs of text in paper worksheets and handouts for teaching. Teacher training courses tend to echo the 'sans for dyslexics' notion but in addition suggest the use of headings with space before and after and the use of bullet points to break up material, the use of right-ragged (for LTR languages) so that inter-word spacing remains constant, and the use of line spacing chosen so that the space between the lines is a bit longer than the spacing between the words. The choice of typeface is seen as being a bit less important (as long as it is consistent within the handout) given that secondary school children will be familiar with a range of type faces.
Now I'm trying to find some kind of reference for this view about presentation of the page. If anyone has any ideas that would be ace.
The British Dyslexia Association provide this pdf
https://www.thedyslexia-spldtrust.org.uk/media/downloads/69-...
I recently discovered Practical Typography [1] and Typography for Lawyers [2] by Matthew Butterick which have changed the way I've approached presenting information. I would highly recommend each for anyone who uses text to communicate. Butterick is a Tufte for text.
[1] https://practicaltypography.com
[2] https://typographyforlawyers.com.
Butterick introduced me to Bitstream Charter for which I'm very greatful. However, I would very strongly urge people to disregard his recommendations for representing hyperlinks.
Instead of just underlining hyperlinks, he has this demented nonsense:
> Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
> Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so.
Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.
...why? I'm thinking about it and don't have the slightest idea. And it's not a difficulty I ever came across with my students when I taught ESL.
All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."
Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.
Uppercase doesn't distort shapes, they're just the uppercase shapes. Reading in all-uppercase is a basic skill that you quickly learn, since it's extremely common in signs, titles, etc.
I can understand that learning separate letters for lowercase and uppercase is something that students coming from other writing systems have to learn, the same way I had to learn both uppercase and lowercase in Greek.
But it's just a year-one skill you have to learn. You learn it, fairly quickly, and then you're fine. It's not a reason to avoid using small caps. Generally speaking, by the time your English skills are good enough to read an average paragraph, text in all-uppercase has not been a problem for you for a long time. Vocabulary is the thing that takes a long time to learn, not recognizing words in uppercase.
So while I don't doubt that your ex was telling the truth about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that was just a personal annoyance of hers. It's not a widespread problem. But everybody winds up having their own idiosyncratic annoyances with foreign languages.
It is kinda funny you recommend those books as a reaction to the linked book.
> Nowadays, we expect such matters to be determined by empirical evidence, not by majority opinion. This book is concerned with the empirical evidence concerning the relative legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces
Meanwhile Buttericks books are very much "some guys opinion". Granted, that guy has a big passion, but at the end of the day, his books are not grounded in empirical evidence.
Personally I only care when distinguishing individual letters matters. So things like paths, URIs, passwords, math, & email addresses should be in a font with as few 'confusable' letters as possible. E.g. variables a & α in an equation should look different, I, 1, & l should look different, 0, o, and O should look different, etc. These are almost always easily distinguishable in serif typefaces, and often indistinguishable in sans-serif typefaces, so I tend to prefer using serif typefaces as a default fallback. But it's easy enough to find a sans-serif typeface that's also easy to read all the individual letters in, and sans-serif fonts tend to be a bit easier to read at small text sizes, so I use one of those (a customized Iosevka) for most things on my laptop.
After reading an old 1870's sign painting book I really like the historical terms. There is roman style and egyptian style.
https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/signpaintersguid00ga...
Surprisingly, some languages are better read in more specific fonts.
Maybe it's just a matter of familiarity, but I think it's more than that.
Reading hs.fi in their font of choice in Finnish is just fine, but auto-translated to English (in the same font) feels oh so wrong!
P.S.
Reading hacker news in English in HN font of choice is just fine, while the same sentence translated to Finnish (still in HN font) is mostly OK, but a little worse.
My very uneducated opinion is that doubled consonants and vowels are very common in Finnish, and those are better read with more aggressive kerning, something that HN sanf serif doesn't do.
Example: - lattia on laavaa tallilla - floor is lava in a garage
Is there a general preference for serifs, or a local style in Finland for this reason?
German certainly has typographic preferences that err toward taller x-heights and narrower forms due to heavy use of portmanteaus. It’d be interesting to know of other language-specific typographic styles too.
A long time ago I was in a motorcycle accident, and spent a month in the ICU, intubated, unable to talk. My wife made a spelling board for me to communicate by pointing at the letters. It took me forever to explain that it had to be sans serif, because it was big plain letters. And now this is telling me it didn't matter!? :-)
I believe you when you say it mattered to you, but:
1. Your experience is likely an outlier--I'm not saying your experience doesn't matter, I'm saying that your experience and experiences like yours are likely not represented significantly in the data.
2. Other people with outlier experiences may have different needs, i.e. an intervention which improves one reader's experience may make another reader's experience worse.
I did some web accessibility work which involved interviewing a number of disabled clients, and the ultimate conclusion was that we needed to make our site colors configurable. One group with visual impairment needed high contrast, while a few clients with sensory issues were unable to use the site for long when high contrast was used because it was overstimulating. The lower-contrast modes also had issues for colorblind clients, although these clients were less common in the user pool.
In typical American corporate fashion, the entire research results were scrapped when a donor wanted us to use color schemes related to our brand, despite overwhelmingly positive feedback from users on our accessibility configurability.
Honestly what seems to matter more than anything, at least to me, is the size of the text, not so much the font face itself.
I keep all my text on my computer cartoonishly large, just because I find it 10x easier to read if I do. Who am I trying to impress? Computer fonts are dynamic for a reason, I don't care if it looks like it's made for a blind person.
One thing goes through my mind on this; why the hell is this so hard for people to just pick individually? We could have built the web and apps differently to just more-or-less work the same as most ebook readers. PICK WHAT YOU LIKE.
My personal experience, if I have to sum it up, would be, “Sans Serif is cleaner and easier for normal reads, such as shorter text, menus, and overall interfaces. Serif for longer reads where I need deeper focus.”
I find serifs distracting and "noisy" regardless of text length. Their modern use restricted to headings, wordmarks, etc. makes more sense to me.
We ended up with sans-serif for body text on the web because it's more legibile on low-res screens. I still can't believe that didn't settle the argument right there and then decades ago. If something is easier to read on those crappy old screens, it's easier to read everywhere.
Not all "sans-serifs" are similar, i.e. they cannot be put in a single class opposed to serifs.
The sans-serifs designed before WWII have evolved towards a maximum simplification of the letter forms, eliminating not only the serifs, but also the contrast between thin lines and thick lines and also some other details of the shapes that differentiate the letters. The extreme simplification was achieved in some of the "geometric" sans-serifs, where most of the letter shapes were simplified into circles and straight lines. The motivation for shape simplification was that in the beginning the sans serifs were intended for advertising, i.e. for printing on cheap paper with cheap devices, which could not reproduce fine details. More over such texts were intended to be readable from great distances, from where fine details cannot be perceived.
After WWII, some sans-serifs have just reproduced with negligible changes some of the earlier sans-serifs, e.g. Helvetica and the like.
Most of these sans-serifs, like Arial, are extremely bad for use in computers, because they have a lot of ambiguous letters and digits. That mattered less for English texts, which have high redundancy, allowing the guessing of the intended letters, but in computers there are a lot of abbreviations, keywords, identifiers, expressions and other kinds of character strings with low redundancy, where it may be difficult or impossible to recognize the intended letters or digits.
However, there are also several kinds of very different sans-serifs among those designed after WWII, which attempt to remove the disadvantages of the classic sans-serifs.
One kind is the sans-serifs that have only the goal to remove all ambiguities in letters, digits and other symbols, like most of the monospace typefaces intended for programming.
Another kind, besides removing ambiguity also reintroduces some of the letter shapes from serifs, which have been simplified in the classic sans-serifs, e.g. double-storey "g" and "a", old-style digits, distinct shapes for the italic variant of a font, etc. These slightly more complex shapes increase the distinctness of the letters and digits, making them more easily recognizable. An example of such a typeface is FF Meta.
Finally, there is another kind of sans-serifs that also reintroduces the contrast between thin lines and thick lines. Moreover, among these there are typefaces, e.g. Optima or Palatino Sans, which (on displays with high enough resolution) produce an optical effect similar to serifs, which is achieved not with serifs but by replacing the straight side edges of the lines with slightly concave edges.
In my opinion these kinds of sans-serifs that are intermediate between classic serifs and classic sans-serifs are superior to both classic types, especially for computer use.
Despite being less affected by low screen resolutions, the classic sans-serifs like Helvetica, Arial and many others should never be used for anything, because of their ambiguous glyph shapes.
Serifs have non-ambiguous glyph shapes, but they are heavily distorted at low-screen resolutions or when seen from a distance, so they are also not recommended in many applications.
The good choice is in most cases to use one of the sans-serifs with non-ambiguous glyphs, or for a more beautiful text one of the typefaces inspired by FF Meta or one of those inspired by Optima. For example, my default typeface is Palatino Sans.
Any study about the legibility of serif and sans-serif typefaces that does not include a separate category for non-classic sans serifs is deeply flawed and its results are meaningless.
> Not all "sans-serifs" are similar
True, sure.
> i.e. they cannot be put in a single class opposed to serifs.
Not sure I understand you. Are you saying all serif typefaces are similar? There's old style, didone, slab serif. These differ more than the various sans-serif typefaces, which are really all quite similar ;)
The differences between various kinds of serif typefaces, which consist mostly in which is the width ratio between thin lines and thick lines and between serifs and thin lines, and in some small details of how the lines are terminated are much smaller than the difference between classic sans-serifs and some of the post-WWII sans-serifs, which use different shapes for some of the characters.
The differences between various kinds of serifs are hard to see on a low-resolution computer screen. The didone typefaces cannot be rendered correctly on most computer displays at body text sizes, where they are distorted by greatly reducing the contrast between thin lines and thick lines, which can be seen on printed paper.
At small sizes or from a distance one cannot distinguish the various kinds of serif typefaces, except those with slab serifs, where the serifs remain conspicuous. However, the slab serifs frequently look rather identical with a classic sans serif, except that big serifs are attached to the glyphs, whose only advantage it that they may remove some of the ambiguities, which is one of the reasons why many typefaces for programmers use sans-serif shapes for most characters, but slab-serif shapes for a few of them. (The other reason is specific for monospace typefaces, where slab serifs on the narrow characters ensure a more uniform average color of the text, i.e. a less variable ratio between white areas and black areas.)
On the other hand, the differences in character shapes between something like FF Meta or Palatino Sans or JetBrains Mono vs. Helvetica or Arial are extremely obvious and they matter a lot for legibility.
I agree with you that besides classic serifs from before the Napoleonic wars, classic sans-serifs from before WWII and non-classic sans-serifs, in a legibility study one could include a 4th category, slab serif typefaces, which are distinctive enough from older serif typefaces.
However slab serifs do not have any supporters who claim that they are good for anything else than their original purpose, which was for advertising, the same as for sans-serifs. So nothing is lost by not adding them to a legibility study. On the other hand, not considering non-classic sans-serifs is a methodological mistake, because they are frequently more legible than either classic sans-serifs or classic serifs, so omitting them is like organizing a competition only for known losers.
This seems pretty intent on burying the lead.
The long conclusion seems to be that all the conventional wisdom on the subject is not borne out by the empirical evidence. So why spend so much time explaining all the the conventional wisdom? I don't need you to tell me about 100 people's opinions just to tell me they're all wrong.
* burying the lede
This sounds like a nonsense comparison, no? Surely we can agree that different typefaces have different legibility? And yes, some are serif and some are sans-serif. Also context matters.
Grouping "serif" and grouping "sans-serif" and comparing the groups' legibility is just a stupid undertaking to begin with.
It's certainly not nonsense; it's directly addressing myths created by inadequate or misinterpreted studies.