[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > I'm afraid I can't pull out a reference. The legibility literature is > quite old, which makes it harder. I think Patricia Wright did some, at > the tail end of the period, and she might be a starting point for > searching the data bases. See who she cites. Also look for a guy > called (Derek?) Twyman, a typographer, I think at Reading Uni or > possibly the OU, I think he probably cites the relevant studies.
You're thinking of Michael Twyman. He founded the typography department at the University of Reading. Most of the issues being discussed here fall into the domain of typography. Unfortunately programming editors are so impoverished as a typographic medium that the well-established design practices of the field, whether or not they are applicable to program source code, can't easily be transferred to programming editors. There have, of course, been famous experiments in pretty-printing using proper typographic principles. It's interesting to ask why they haven't become popular - I think because of the discontinuity in quality when the user returns to the screen. The one thing that can be easily done on screen is to change colours - hence the ubiquitous availability of keyword colouring. On the face of it, if there was anything to be gained by distinguishing certain categories of words, then colouring them would be a better solution than using all caps. However, I'm not sure that there is real justification for making keywords stand out. It seems to me that keywords ought to work like punctuation (unobtrusive, just sufficient to indicate underlying structure), rather than like headlines. The real challenge in typography is to support both fluency of reading and emphasis of structure within a compositional structure that does not produce visual strain. I think that most of the research that has been done into reading performance can easily be generalised for programming - if only we have the characterisation of "fluency", "structure" and "strain". Alan -- Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
