I'm curious if there are studies for this? In particular, I always think back to how few people notice common ligatures in books that they are reading. To the point that I would generally be willing to wager decent money, thinking 90% odds, that any given friend/family I have has not noticed it in books that they are reading. Only indicator I have that someone is aware of them, is if they know any typography terms already. :D
I'm curious about this too. Is this just preference/taste and the way everyone does things, or is there evidence to back it up. What could a modern study look like? There are so many aspects like the font, size, width or how much fixed width spacing between chars, screen/page size, background color, type of content. And are there other metrics than reading speed? Like information retention, or psychological effects like do people feel positively or negatively about the content/topic/reading experience.
- > In Universal Principles of Design, the entry on legibility states: Proportionally spaced typefaces are preferred over monospaced.
- It's unclear if that book provides further evidence to this statement
- > One famous research on this is Beldie I. P., Pastoor S. & Schwarz E, 1983, “Fixed versus variable letter width for televised text”, Human Factors, 25, pp.273-277, where part of the results include: The reading time (Task 1) with the variable-matrix character design was 69.1 s on the average, and the mean reading time with the fixed-matrix character set was 73.3 s, t (8) = 2.76, p < 0.02. The difference is 4.2 s or 6.1% (related to fixed-matrix characters).
- I couldn't find a pdf of that one in particular. The difference seems small
- > Comic Sans MS, Arial and Times New Roman typefaces, regardless of size, were found to be more readable (as measured by a reading efficiency score) than Courier New.
- small sample size 27 children. also the children preferred comic sans... we could pick a cooler monospace font than courier new
> We compared the effects of fixed and variable (proportional) spacing on reading speeds and found variable pitch to yield better performance at medium and large character sizes and fixed pitch to be superior for character sizes approaching the acuity limit.
