I am a bit late to the conversation... but a few observations, most of which have already been made:
(1) We too did pretty extensive studies of the impact font style and design on reading back in the mid-80s. Our conclusions were that Serif vs San-Serif was pretty much in the noise. However, Monospace was harder to read as it distorts the overall word shape. (2) The primary focus of our work was to study the impact of anti-aliasing on reading. Big positive impact, although I don't think anyone today is disputing that. But it remains paramount that we provide a great reading experience. (3) Font designers have often targeted specific tasks and devices and there has been a rich history of interplay between design and technology. Relevant to our work would be to consider some of the tasks: * young readers I: maybe a font that is all upper case or all lower case (there is a relevant ticket [1] still open on this). * young readers II: it has been argued (in OZ) that the shape of the lower-case A can be confusing and they have proposed a font to mitigate the problem (See discussion at [2]) * at one point, I designed a font for programming that made more pronounced visual distinctions between, for example, colon and semi-colons. There are such fonts available today. (See [3] as an example.) * i18n: As CJL has pointed out, glyph coverage is very important to our audience * Sometimes typography is used for expression: We should make sure that we provide some degrees of freedom in this regard. (See [4] for example) So where does this leave us: One size does not fit all. regards. -walter [1] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/878 [2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2012-January/014825.html [3] http://wpengineer.com/2150/linux-programming-fonts/ [4] http://acrisdesign.com/2010/01/wow-typography-art/ -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
