Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!rutgers!mtunx!whuts!whutt!mls
From: mls@whutt.UUCP (SIEMON)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Scaling Outline Fonts
Message-ID: <3062@whutt.UUCP>
Date: 13 Apr 88 18:43:40 GMT
References: <5352@pyr.gatech.EDU> <871@hjuxa.UUCP> <49095@sun.uucp> <7660@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 26
Summary: data?

In article <7660@brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>	...
> 
> For that matter, by now we're all used to running text set in sans-serif
> fonts such as Helvetica, but that doesn't make it as easy to read as a
> good serif font, something that good typographers acknowledge but that
> the "artistic" typographers don't seem to care about.
> 

Doug, do you have any references to recent studies on this?  I'm not disputing
that serifed faces are easier to read (they ARE for me), but the only tests
of this that I know of go back to the 30s and 40s (some were by Cyril Burt,
so they are almost a priori suspect, but there was an American study sometime
in the late 40s as well.)

The point of the query is that I've also seen the suggestion that the better
performance of subjects with serifs is at least in part a matter of familiarity
with the font (what one learned to read from, in fact.)

I would greatly enjoy seeing reviews/reports on recent work in this newsgroup.

-- 
Michael L. Siemon
contracted to AT&T Bell Laboratories
ihnp4!mhuxu!mls
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