

Serif vs. sans-serif legibility - vladocar
http://www.vcarrer.com/2009/10/serif-vs-sans-serif-legibility.html

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ugh
There are empirical studies out there. No reason to speculate. The results:
Mostly meh (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=808082>). Not much of a
difference either way, if any.

Looking at the history of how we write and print it is very hard for me to
actually believe that serifs were put on letters with legibility in mind. One
of the oldest examples of the use of serifs is this inscription:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/002_Conra...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/002_Conrad_Cichorius%2C_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianssäule%2C_Tafel_II.jpg)
(jpg, Trajan’s Column, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column>).
And this kind of script was pretty much only used for monuments. Why optimise
that for fast reading of long texts at small sizes?

I believe there were aesthetic reasons. Maybe even engineering reasons (pure
speculation: it could be that carving into stone with the tools available at
the time automatically produces little serifs – so they just decided to make
them all look consistent). But legibility? I doubt it.

------
blue1
Legibility is mostly a consequence of training, i.e. habit (see the famous
article by Rudy VanderLans in Emigre magazine, in the 90's). For example, the
fraktur typefaces of Germany (the ones you see in nazi movies), they seem
unreadable to our eyes.

For a more familiar example, programmers seem to prefer aliased or antialased
fonts in their editors depending on what they are accustomed to see. When I
switched from aquamacs (antialiased) to linux emacs (aliased), I found it
unreadable. After some time, the reverse became true.

------
Semiapies
"First thing I tried Jost Hochuli theory that we need only upper half of the
letter in order to understand the text."

And then he's comparing the top _quarters_ of C's and O's in different fonts.

------
m_eiman
If you're going to try to determine which is easier to read, it doesn't make
any sense at all to base your reasoning on how the fonts look when they're
huge - you need to look at their appearance when they're rendered as they're
intended to be used.

As a side note: why is it so common with negative letter spacing? Do the fonts
look bad "as designed" on some common OS/browser combo? On my OSX+Firefox it
just makes the text harder to read and it looks too cramped.

