I know only enough about typography to be dangerous, and am not sure how to best phrase my question.
In a long, text-dense document, where low page count is a top priority and legibility is also a concern, is Times (or close relatives like Times New Roman etc.) a particularly good choice? Are there better choices among the fonts most people have installed?
In the document in question, although headings would naturally be larger, the body text would be around 9 or 10 pt.
I vaguely remember reading or hearing that Times was originally developed for exactly this purpose – that is, fitting lots of text into the available space without sacrificing much legibility – and that it is good at this task, though not elegant or especially attractive. But I can’t find a cite for anything like that now. I suspect my Google skills aren’t up to the challenge without some better terminology.
(Please note I’m not asking about readability factors of the overall document, things like margins, line length, leading, etc., just whether I ought to start with Times or with something else.)
This is a question I’ve wanted to ask for a while. I’ll add an extra bit, if you don’t mind:
How would the answer to the above differ depending on whether or not the document was written to be printed? I seem to remember people saying it definitely would, but no specifics.
For onscreen use, (barring displays so high resolution that they’re effectively paper), you will prefer a san-serif font (i.e. no little dingles on the ends of line segments). Helvetica is the classic choice, although there are numerous others.
For print use, serifs tend to lead the eye and are indeed more legible. Times-Roman and it’s variants are good choices, Palatino is a little more compact. Again there are a bunch of others.
Why the difference? Pixelization. Even with anti-aliasing available, you get eye-slowing blockiness from sub-pixel-sized serifs: they either vanish unexpectedly, or become huge monstrosities. Add in sub-pixel placement of the text, and they become unpredictable as as an added unbonus.
Good very basic reference for this stuff is Robin William’s (no, not the comedian) “The Mac is not a Typewriter,” if you can still find it, or any modern book on typography.
There’s also a pretty good article on specific font choices here, although it strangely sets in a serif font for onscreen reading…
Hmmn. The link has great specific information about how various fonts are experienced by people with visual difficulties, but doesn’t address my particular question.
Palatino? Really? I’ll have to go play with it, but my general impression has been that at the same point size, less text fits on a page than with Times.
Maybe at teeny-tiny point sizes this is true, but I can tell you that I hate reading large blocks of sans-serif type on screen, and find it much easier to handle a decent serif font. Many online publications seem to use sans-serif, presumably following this “rule,” and I hate it.
From work I did long before joining the Dope, I can say that I found that Bodoni fonts preserve readability at small type sizes, probably better than anything else available to me at the time.
Hmm… I had an overlong school report back in the day with a maximum # of pages (a page RANGE was specified in the assignment) and found a font that squeezed what would have been 7.5 pages in Times 10 point into 4 pages, legibly.
I think it was a sans serif font, started wtih “0” but was NOT Optima, had deceptively tight spacing, expecially vertically (short squat letters, many lines per inch) somewhat rounded-looking with very tightly squeezed space between letters. (I’d still have the document but the font won’t have been embedded in in so that won’t help much).
Onyx, maybe? ::checks:: no, that’s not it although it’s a little bit smaller than Times sure enough. Onyx is tight horizontally rather than vertically and it’s only marginally smaller than Times.
You’re young, I’m guessing. 9 or 10 point is teensy-tiny to us old folks. But for print, it won’t matter anyway.
Anyway, the differences between Times/Palatino/Bookman/Garamond/Caslon/etc. are less ones of legibility (they’re all relatively similar serif fonts) than ones of style. They were designed by particular publishers to give their documents a “feel” different from other similar publications (there’s some history on Times Roman, in particular, in Wikipedia). At this point, I’d suspect that your particular font implementation and layout application have more to do with the legibility and other scanning properties than the font itself.
But it’s easy to do the experiment. Set a couple of paragraphs of text in each of the candidate fonts at the same size (this will also tell you which font is smallest at a given nominal size). Grab a stopwatch and read each one through twice (to minimizes familiarity effect).
Or, just pick the one you like the best, which might be the right answer, anyway.
I am suitably flattered, but you are mistaken. I am 58 and my eyes are far from perfect.
I am not sure what relevance that has to my comment.
And I am telling you that I have already decided, after much much experience. Contrary to what you said earlier, I find that if I have to read large blocks of type on screen (probably on the page too, but that is not the issue) I much prefer it to be in a decent serif font (TNR is fine) rather than the sans-serif ones that are all too common on the web. It does not really matter for relatively short blocks, such as the average SDMB post, but at article length i find sans-serif annoying. (What you say about pixellation adversely affecting serifs is no doubt true for very small point sizes, but I do not find this to be a problem at 9 or 10 point. Anyway, if text is too small on screen, it is almost always possible to enlarge it.)
There have been numerous studies on readability of various fonts (and in particular, sans vs serifs) but you must remember that much of it is preference based on your own experiences - younger people tend to prefer sans because that’s what they are used to reading and visa versa.
However, back to the OP, Times is readable at small sizes because it has a large ‘x-height’ and small ascenders and descenders. The x-height is the height of a lower case x, the ascenders and descenders being the bits that hang above and below the x-height. A large x-height means that at small sizes, certain fonts will appear larger and therefore more legible - compare Times to something like Futura to see this difference (Futura has a very small x-height). For a similar sans serif comparison, compare Arial or Helvetica (large x-heights) with Gill Sans (small x-height).
For an extreme example of a typeface that has been specifically designed for use at very small sizes, see Bell Gothic, designed for use in phone directories where poor printing would mean characters would start to fill in with ink at small sizes. Not suggesting you use this, by the way, just an interesting example.
Does anyone have reputable cites re: readability? I know that a few years ago I went looking for some and it seemed that any claims that one font was superior to another were flimsy and often contradicted by other equally flimsy claims.