> [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.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
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
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.”
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!? :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
64 comments
> [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.
I realize it’s lazy to just ask, but… 160 pages…
- 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.
> 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"?
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.
I can only hope that they split between the two.
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-...
[1] https://practicaltypography.com
[2] https://typographyforlawyers.com.
https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/signpaintersguid00ga...
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
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.
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.
Grouping "serif" and grouping "sans-serif" and comparing the groups' legibility is just a stupid undertaking to begin with.