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The Math of Text Readability
An anonymous reader writes "Wired magazine has an article that explains The Law of Optical Volumes, a formula for spacing the letters on a printed page that results in maximum readability. Wired's new logo (did anyone notice?) obeys the law. Unfortunately, Web fonts don't allow custom kerning pairs, so you can't work the same magic online as in print. Could this be why some people still prefer newspapers and magazines to the Web?"
Well there IS pdf's, if you wanna be that picky......
~
Was Jenna Fischer nude
True, PDF documents have kerning in them, but the hinting used to display glyphs in PDF documents on a 70 to 120 DPI screen without blurring the crap out of the glyphs distorts the spacing balance.
Having all the typefaces look *exactly* right is one of those things that only printers really care about. Don't get me wrong, it's worth the trouble, for the *printed page*.
But on the web? I don't think anyone would really notice or care that much. Plus, it'd be hard to achieve, since you can't rely on all machines rendering fonts at the same resolution, and you can't rely on fonts actually being present on all machines, and you can't rely on all the *versions* of a typeface actually being the same across different platforms. None of this is news. The web was designed to sort-of deal with these problems. Or at least, ignore them.
Someday, when we're all running ultra-high-res displays, and someone releases a shitload of completey free (as in beer and freedom), high-quality fonts (I think this is the biggest issue, personally), then we'll all see the same nice fonts on our computers.
--- Just say no to negativity.
So they basically put some letters closer together when possible. Personally I've noted that Magazines and Papers put a good bit of thought into layout, but I've never found them easier to read. On the contrary, screen fonts are bigger and are easier on the eyes than letters on glossy paper.
The most readable text I've seen is what is output from a common Laser printer, and I do not believe they use 'kerning' fonts.
Is the lack of good font control. Lack of kerning is one thing. Another is you can't have font sizes for each individual fallback font - fonts can vary in size so much that you have to write for the most common font or risk throwing the design for everyone else.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I always thought that kerning of installed (and injected) fonts is pretty much OS responsibility. So if you have kerning enabled (see, for example, Typography.Kerning in .NET, as we're talking mostly about Windows) adjustments of the font will be done automatically. So I guess if you force browser to download font via CSS2 that has kerning information it should "just work".
Alas, I always thought that forcing downloading of custom font is a bad idea (jut like forcing user to use some fixed font size) as not everyone may be a big fan of new fancy font.
Oh well.
Hyperom.com
The concept of WIRED magazine and its associated web site being interested in readability seems ludicrous.
Consider their track record of using tiny type, garish color schemes, and layouts that I find difficult to characterize, making it nearly impossible for anyone with any of a number of (even slight) impairments to their eyesight (including especially presbyopia - the lack of accommodation that accompanies middle age) to read their publications comfortably - or even at all.
I've often thought that this was done deliberately, to repell all but young readers, as part of targeting their circulation on the perceived avant-garde youth of gen-Y and beyond.
Now they're modifying their logo for readability. ORLY? Is their target demographic aging enough that this is now a problem? Are readers deserting them due to headaches just as they graduate into serious spending money? Or are they just playing around with another art/layout fad?
If they were really serious about readability I'd expect them to be modifying other aspects of their magazine and site layout. But TFA shows that is not happening. So I'll go with "fad".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
hehe
The new one is just the opposite of the old one, very interesting. I don't really see how this umm law applies more to one than the other tho.
I do see what they are saying tho. A good sample is the button below for Plain Old Text. In that font it looks like the sans-serif T wants to get away altho in this font the seriffed T looks fine cause of a extra dot.
"Someday, when we're all running ultra-high-res displays, and someone releases a shitload of completey free (as in beer and freedom), high-quality fonts (I think this is the biggest issue, personally), then we'll all see the same nice fonts on our computers."
Welcome to slashdot were doing anything that goes on the internet isn't really "work".
"Traditional fonts usually included several hundred kerning pairs. Hoefler & Frere-Jones' fonts are super-fussy - they can include 10,000 pairs to get every combo of letters exactly right. "
That's work, and that's only a small part of what's known as typography.
Current screens of any usable size still have about 1/3 to 1/2 the dot density of a printed page. Until we can get screens up above 300dpi, print will continue to win. And that's not even mentioning things like kerning and manually adjusting word spacing--an area that takes a lot of experience and time to do well.
I have actually written software to kern text (for the sign-making industry) and can testify that kerning is not an exact science. Yes, one needs to even up the areas of white space between letter, but then one needs to bias the calculations in favour of the tops of the letters. And then make some allowance for any white space inside the letters, and .... and .... and ..... Spacing that is correct for 12-point type on paper would be quite wrong for a huge 3D sign on the side of a building, and so on.
For perfection, there is no substitute for the human eye. The algorithms used by our brains to unscramble text are very complex.
The very notion of Wired magazine talking about the readability of fonts is, in itself, hilarious and full of irony.
Unfortunately the WIRED headline "underwire" doesn't obey those rules.
I'm generally unhappy with kerning on websites, unless they use certain fonts (sorry, I've never cared enough to look them up, although oddly enough they were serif fonts whereas I like sans-serif on websites).
The biggest issue for readability was:
- not too small
- decent line spacing
- NOT black on white. Dark grey on white, or black on pale grey
- Nice margins to other content
(aside, remember when people used to call them founts back in the 80s?)
I've actually found the Wii Opera browser quite readable even on a 576i PAL TV (once zoomed in on the content anyway), and I attribute that to decent fonts and colours.
The main reason why it is much harder to produce a good looking font on a screen is due to the low dpi factor of screens. In print, you can get a much higher dpi and as such some fonts like Times look great. But on the screen they look like crap because the screen only has so much resolution. You can play a few tricks with current lcd technology and anti-aliasing but compare it to anything in print and there's no comparison.
I certainly wouldn't mind higher resolution displays to display crisper fonts. And no, I'm not talking about running Windows at 3200x2400 so I can fit 4 1600x1200 browser windows on the screen, but rather so that my 10pt font looks much sharper. Then, maybe then I wouldn't have to read a blurry pdf on the screen or be forced to zoom in so the fonts render clearer.
That law can't be right, because it would mean that the correct kerning wouldn't depend on the letters at all. Give each letter a nominal bounding box, and use this box for spacing. The "before" area is the area between the letter and the left edge; the "after" area is on the right. The area between two letters is the total of the first one's "after" area and the second one's "before" area. If you want the area to be a particular constant, adjust all the left edges so that all of the letters have half that constant as their "before" areas, and adjust the right edges so all the letters also have half that constant as their "after" areas. Obviously, then, all of the spacing is perfect by the law, regardless of the letters involved. (Okay, so I'm ignoring different heights of adjacent space; there's more height in the area in "ll" than "mm", but that translates to constant space removals between adjacent right and left ascenders or descenders.)
But correct kerning depends on the letter pairs, with some examples mattering a lot, and some being less important. So this law, as stated, is clearly wrong. Correct kerning takes into account the fact that "AV" has room to overlap vertically, while "VV" and "AA" don't, so the particular shapes actually matter. Any possible good rule has to be non-linear to account for this, and certainly trickier than the rule given. I suspect that there isn't a good rule known (other than "get sombody with a good eye to adjust it"), or fonts would just have a "crowdedness" parameter, and the rendering engine would use the rule and the parameter to generate ideal kernings for all pairs of characters on the fly.
White space, fonts and text density are minor concerns to me (intense reader for decades). Computers are fine for relaxed reads, but for long texts, the medium's just wrong: I prefer paper books.
... intense focus and keeping my circulation moving ... and so I find PDF manuals distasteful. Books: Grab, flip open, crawl inside... quickly, wherever. Maybe it's long habit, but considering the e-book flop, I 'spect I'm part of a majority.
Computers breaks my study habits
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The space between letters on my screen generally has a lot of anti-alias grey pixels, and even subpixel-rendering-derived colored pixels, in it. It's not empty.
One approach would be to apply this sort of kerning logic to a font in a completely analog way (like one would in print), assuming an infinite-resolution display, and then use antialiasing and subpixel-level antialiasing to squeeze more resolution out of the screen.
Nonetheless, text looks better when lines fall evenly on a pixel boundary -- if a line is one pixel wide, for instance, I'd rather have column 10 illuminated fully than a mix of columns 10 and 11 dictated by the kerning algorithm and provided by the antialiasing code.
Zelaous application of the kerning rules would result in nearly all characters falling halfway between two pixels. Antialiasing makes diagonal lines look smooth, and it's wonderful for that, but I don't want all my text looking like it's displayed on an LCD at non-native resolution.
Interestingly, The GIMP has two modes for its text tool -- one that makes some compromises on "the exact shape and spacing dictated by the font" in order to *improve* readability once you quantize distance by sticking the characters in pixels. I find this mode is far more readable for small characters than the one that doesn't.
I thought someone might finally have come up with some serious research showing how to objectively improve readability, but it's just a summary of kerning.
Why is this area so bare of real scientific results? There have been a few studies into on-screen readability, typically measuring things like reading speed, accuracy of recollection afterwards, and subjective approval of the document by the reader. However, there are so many variables that people don't seem to control that it's hard to see any general patterns. For example, changing the font from 10pt to 12pt on screen may well not just scale the size by 120%, but also make the dominant strokes two pixels wide rather than one. There is little consistency among conclusions about optimal font size for reading across fonts or whether serif or sans-serif fonts are more readable, perhaps because there are so many variables.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer for comprehensive research.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How does this law apply to punctuation and multi-part characters like i and j? Does the area to left of the space between the dot and stroke of the i count towards the 'volume'? Does all small punctuation have to be exceedingly far away from everything to maintain that space, or does the law just not apply in such cases (in which case, what is the generalized law?). Cool idea none the less, but it'd be nice if it were better specified.
It's Maths, with an S.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Have you noticed that Wired's 'NEW' logo uses an almost monospaced font (ie: the kind used on old manual typewriters aka 'Courier' - where every character was the same width, hence the lowercase i with very large serifs to take up the space effectively)? Only the W is of a different width, but they've balanced it by using a slab-serif I and then balanced the useage of that amongst the sans-serif face by also including a slab-serif E so that it doesn't stand out in your subconcious. Such is the way of kerning... it's not mathematical at all, it's all in the 'feeling'. It's a purely aesthetic exercise and as has been quite rightly pointed out in the comments, a font that is perfectly kerned at 12pt becomes odd-looking when scaled up to a display size (even scaling to something like 120pt would show it) - hence some type families including a 'display' version specifically kerned for use at larger sizes. Typography... it's all in the whitespace y'know ;)
This is exactly why MS Word sucks and LaTeX is awesome, at least in terms of readability. Try reading a LaTeX'ed documunt on the screen, it is extremely pleasant.
Web fonts don't have custom kerning pairs
;)
Whilst true, this is a bit misguided.
First things first - web fonts, and print fonts are the same. Fonts are fonts. Some are better than others and include more default kerning pairs than others. But rest assured, Georgia, Arial etc have got kerning pairs (for print and screen) and hinting information (for screen).
Type rendering engines *do* support kerning pairs, that the typographer who designed the font decided to create and embed in the font file. There are a bunch of patterns that are used to expose badly spaced pairs that typographers use when checking these spaces and fixing them.
Custom kerning for print is actually font independent and is done in the print design app of choice. Print design uses these same font files and their kerning pairs, and print designers won't custom kern large blocks of text, unless of course they want to spend 3 days per page of content. Print designers do often kern large headings and logotypes where any subtle problems are (literally) magnified and are obvious to the reader. Online designers do this in a number of ways, but typically resort to using an image (because the logotype font isn't likely to be on the end users computer anyway). CSS does give you the ability to create custom kerning pairs if you would want it, through a mixture of text-indents, spans and margins but its not very clean.
So the author if this piece is correct, but a little misguided and not being particularly fair on "the web".
http://webtypography.net/ This link goes to a way of implementing Elements of Typology online; which is supposed to improve readability. Its interesting in that it sort of goes against the common idea with screen size and web text. The common idea, as I understand it, is that we should not worry about the 800X600 and use as much screen real estate as possible. Then, text columns can stretch as wide as my 19" monitor will let them. The problem is, that works against readability. The "optimal" is about 4.5". I use 37em for text body width, and that seems to work.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Come on, nobody should ever need anything but a 80 columns ascii terminal.
Kerning is a scam to destroy ascii artists !!
Unfortunately, Web fonts don't allow custom kerning pairs, so you can't work the same magic online as in print.
They don't? What the hell are you talking about? A TrueType font contains a kerning table. If the font rendering does not kern properly, it just means the rendering engine is a piece of shit. There is nothing about "web fonts" (what the hell does that mean?) that preclude proper kerning. It just means that the fonts which are typically installed have shitty kerning tables.
I took a look at the Wired web site expecting to see something nice and elegant, but was met with something I consider to be really ugly. They seem to have missed out on applying it and having something pleasing to look at.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I'm sorry, all I could find on that page is a lot of designer mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-science.
Where is the actual evidence that this "maximizes readability"?
When come to font and screen, very few people gets it. Even in the article, "Web fonts in 2007 still don't have kerning pairs", what does it means? Anyone care to exlain? As far as I know, quite a number of fonts in my machine do have kerning pairs, and web browsers rendered them nicely. There are exceptions, of course, but that does not mean Web fonts don't have kerning pairs. I know this, I have done more complex work than just kerning (like mark positiong,ligatures, contextual alternatives etc).
One thing that the article fails to explain is, when comes to screen reading, kerning is just one facter. The other VERY important factor is how well the glyph is rendered. In truetype fonts, this is achieved through proper hinting, and I really mean PROPER. As far as I can tell, there are very limited fonts that are properly hinted, even the commercial ones. To make matter worse, part of hinting are patented, make it more difficult to be available on platform like Linux (without using the patent, that is).
Freetype has done a termendous job on getting their "autohinter" working, but it will never be the same as font hinting. This is because when a font is hinted, the designer decides how it will exactly look like at specified resolution, while with autohinter, the program have to "figure out" how it suppose to look like. You know which one will produce a better output. Of course, all this does not apply to printed material where the printers are high resolution.
So far, even though truetype hinting is aging, it seems like there is no better substitude in the pipeline.
It seems to me that this could be a reason why programmers generally seem to like monospaced fonts. Not only do things line up in columns, but each letter is easier to pick out and read (due to the singular widths of letters).
For example, this sentence takes up more space, but is easier to read.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
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Good typesetting/layout programs allow to make nice ligatures (I've "typeset" books using Quark XPress and... LaTeX [yay!] and they both support typographical ligatures). Honestly I've seen some CS paper produced with LaTeX that were, to me, piece of art. When I read a document where the "fi" is not correctly ligatured, I see it immediately (but admittedly I've got trained eyes).
Another thing is that a printer working, say, at 1200 dpi, is still one order of magnitude more precise than a screen. Not too mention that some people find it less tiring to read a book/magazine/newspaper than on a computer screen.
Besides that, I'm programming using a monospaced "programmer font" (non-aliased, "pixel perfect" font) and I don't want ligature to appear in my editor anytime soon...
Wonky mathematics.
o
Factually inaccurate.
Speculation.
No news.
Please Slashdot, it's not the volume of articles that matters to anyone. It's the quality of articles that matters. If you prune articles like this, other, better articles will be easier to spot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_rati
It looked better in print.
Yes, back in 1940 you could see the thickness of lead in the linotype output, which was indeed a volume. That sounds good, but it might not be right because I just made it up. I do, however have a jar of old lead letters about that old for fun and props. No linotype blocks though.
If you want to get really hoary, I'll bust out my old IBM typewriter, hook it up to WP 4.x and show you proportional fonts that are all about areas instead of volumes. Then we can party like it's 1989.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Please, please, please don't put a kerning attribute into the hands of people who consider fixing up their MySpace profile "web design".
d ownsoIcouldfititallin.
Welcometomysite.IhavealottosaysoIturnedthekerning
...is that nobody seems to care about margins.
In so many websites (and yeah, Slashdot, I'm lookin' at you) every square inch of screen space seems to be cram-jam full of content, pictures, navigation menus, adds, sidebars, logos...
Stop. Please... just stop.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
I don't get where they pulled that "web fonts don't kern" from. I can see the kerning differences between Vera Sans and DejaVu Sans in my browser, even though they use identical letter shapes.
Which one looks better is largely a matter of opinion, though I like the way DejaVu has funny spacing between T and small letters.
This isn't anything new. Its not the "math" or the "science" or the "law" of anything. Its just kerning. Along with ligatures, built into most fonts.
The Admin and the Engineer
I get them confused. Is kerning the one where guys in kilts toss trees, or is it the one where they push a rock on ice and use tiny brooms to make it stop?
looks like it was ripped from ICTCM.
Sig free's the way to be.
As David Kindersley's experiments have shown, it's more about the interplay of light and dark as perceived by the human eye than mere physical measurements.
See his _Optical Letter Spacing For new printing systems_ for a more detailed system and account --- but as Dr. Charles Bigelow has stated, no system fully accounts for all subtleties of all designs and the perceptions of the human eye. Co-designer of the Lucida superfamily, and having worked out the spacing system used for the Optima capitals sandblasted into Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial and newly placed as a profesor at RIT he's well-worth pying attention to.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is a real complaint and is often a key element to good usability: the correct use of whitespace and grouping. One of my complaints when slashdot was trying to pick a new theme for the website was that the current theme doesn't use whitespace effectively and relies too much on unnecessary lines and gradients.
Looking at the comment form there's already an issue. The current comment form looks something like:
Of course the bolding helps but the whitespace use is incorrect. A better layout would be:
Another big beef I have with the comment layout is when you're reading comments there is no consideration outside of the styling for whitespace. So if you just glance at the page, your eye gets confused because things aren't grouped well or separated by whitespace. You have to train yourself that the green bar denotes the top and the gray bar denotes the bottom and the stuff in between is the comment. This could easily be fixed if there was whitespace.
For example, the current comments look like this:
(Unfortunately the lines don't show up well because slashdot complains when I use too many of those characters) But why so much need for the styling? It looks cluttered in my opinion. You can easily get by with whitespace and grouping instead of adding more styling. I don't want to see your lines and gradients. I want to read the comment. Something much easier to read would be like the following:
A Comment Title[small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly.
Reply
A Comment Title
[small font meta information]
Finally the comment text.
Which hopefully is more than one line.
So you can actually identify it quickly.
Reply
Obviously I have limited tools available with the allowed html but I would put a little more spacing above and below the comment body to allow the body to be more defined. But I'd certainly get rid of all of the backgrounds except maybe the title bars like how the old slashdot had it. In the current layout I even get confused trying to understand which comment is a parent/child when there are many responses. There's simply too many lines and backgrounds, it's annoying.
I agree. Whitespace is very important. I prefer to have decent margins and padding when I create web pages and I tend to use san-serif fonts for readablity. Also fixed-width is very important too. It's harder to read wide columns. Another good place to start is A List Apart, but there are other good resources as well.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Personally, I'd be upset if web designers had precise control over font rendering. I've overridden Firefox's default fonts with ones that I prefer, and regularly use ctrl + and ctrl - to adjust font sizes. It's better to have a fluid, customizable presentation layer for on-screen reading. Otherwise, we'd probably be using PDF instead of HTML.
Also, I feel like we already have plenty of free (freedom) fonts, and high quality renderers; kerning for desktop computers was solved in the 80's. (Antialiasing was huge and recent though.) Anyway, I'd like a 300 dpi display, and resolution independent rendering will make them practical. Today's models have the resolution of a dot matrix printer in draft mode... No mater how good the font renderer, it's going to look lousy compared to a modern printer or a book.
Who's forcing you to have your web browser filling the whole screen? Just make the window narrower. Works fine for me. If you start adding five-centimetre margins to every chunk of text on the web, that's just going to piss off those who are looking at a different-sized window.
In the print world, a sentence break is wider than a word break, for superior legibility. Standard HTML rendering compresses any string of spaces down to a single en-space sized blank. But there are ways around that. When I write for the web, I always add an extra space after a full-stop using the non-breaking space escape:
But I can't do that here. Slashdot prevents posters from using non-breaking spaces, among many other things (I can't use standard physics or trigonometric notation, because Slashdot blocks the Greek characters Δ, θ, etc. I can't even use π).
What's truly sad is that non-breaking spaces USED to work here, but they got filtered out sometime in the past few years. And, despite my complaints, nobody ever put the capability back.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I'm pretty sure the problem isn't fonts and kerning.
When they come up with a practical way to display text online that isn't backlit, I'll be interested. Paper reflects ambient light from the room. Computer displays don't (with occasional exceptions where the background is usually a medium gray, not white). Solve that, and e-books will take off.
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If the font has serifs, you'll be able to read it just about as well as if the entire line is exposed. This is important (he said, puffing himself up) because when we read, we generally scan letter shapes and word shapes that are familiar - it's unconscious - but has been demonstrated in the lab umpteen years ago by so-and-so as well as whosit (you in the back, pay attention!).
Try it without serifs - you can still read, but you're working a bit harder, eh?
This has been implicitly understood since the time of Caxton and is the reason why these font standards have evolved ever since.
There's a term for this, uh legibility.
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
That expression was supposed to read s/\([^ ]\) \([^ ]\)/\1 \2/g
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Same tech is used on road signs; swhy the letters are different sizes.
Some people just like the smell of old books, some folk want to feel they're holding the actual copy and it's a real thing - and books don't have 'issues' like popups, spyware and hassles, a book is just text with sometimes a few unidentifiable things stuck to the pages.
I, for one, prefer eBooks, I have -20 diopters of sucky myopia (short sightedness) in both eyes and I prefer reading on the screen, I can change the fonts, manipulate the text until I'm happy with it and read more or less comfortably. However, I really miss lying in the bath/bed reading.
Don't suggest Audio books, I can't stand audio books 99% of the time.
Now if someone could make a cheap, lightweight eBook reader with a large (I'm talking somewhere between A4 and A5 size) and I can set the fonts to white on black, I would sell all three of my nuts.
Good day.
The key is to not define the size of the margin but the size of the block of text. Readability is dependent on the relationship between the width of the block of text and the vertical spacing between lines. Wider lines need wider gaps to keep your eyes from getting lost on "carriage returns." (of course there are other aspects as well, but this is big until your lines get absurdly wide)
Most browsers accept a max-width CSS rule. For IE you can either write a special fixed-width rule, or use a tiny bit of Javascript: (Sorry, my JavaScript skills are minimal to say the least. All suggested improvements very welcome.)
Sorry, if thats true, than you are misusing your font rendering.
If your fontsize is so small that you get subpixel letter distances, you obviously dont care about either screen DPI or general readablility, so you dont apply to their target group.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
of course, first thing that occured to me, I said, by george, dosen't the new logo of wired obey the laws of optical volumes. I, for one, welcome our new optical overlords.
prepare the survey weasels.
Once again /. is on crack. Btw the difference in kerning between Vera and DejaVu is a font shaper bug.
I'm pretty sure your stupid Windows box with bloody stupid font handling doesn't.
Some people just happen to use other softwares.
I can almost bet that there are several publish surfing on their work's Mac with all font beautifying extension turned on who see a different result than you.
On Linux web browser tend to not use kerning (Firefox, Konqueror - in their default settings) and text processors (OpenWriter) tend to use kerning if information provided by the font (I don't know if FreeType has an auto-kerning mode for fonts without kerning mode, though it has an-auto hinting mode for fonts without or with patent-protected hinting)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It is a bit of a stretch that kerning is news. But at least it is funny, because Wired's web font (Verdana) IS kerned at least for me (Gentoo). Though a better example is something like 'Trebuchet MS' which is heavily kerned. (which in another irony ./ uses where it specifies a font (why is the subject entry box font specified when the comment entry box is simply the browser default?))
Which is what the experts knew and designed for all along. Unfortunately the "web designers" thought they knew more about design than the typographers who've been designing text for millenia, and the developers who knew enough to know what they didn't know.
Someone please mod that up. Yes, this "equal area" thing is rubbish. With no kerning at all, "AA", "VV", "AV" and "VA" all have exactly the same *area* between them. When they are correctly kerned, "AA" and "VV" have more area between them than "AV" and "VA".
I'd disagree on not using the screen width (I can resize* my windows, you know), but at least you measured your space owith 'em'. I can't really handle people that sets maxwidth (or even worse, the placement of text) with pixels.
* In fact, I didn't notice that before, but my first reaction to full screen text is to increase the font size. I don't do that when there is a left menu. I still like full width + big fonts better.
Rethinking email
http://www.veer.com/products/merchdetail.aspx?imag e=vpr0001260
Kerning, by decreasing the space between characters, can make OCR more dificult. For example, the difference between % and O/o can be hard enough to tell in certain fonts without kerning. Throw Kerning in, and they can become impossible to tell.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I can't believe that Wired, the most typographically-challenged magazine in print, is printing an article about readability. Is this a case of "Do as I say, not as I do", or just basic couldn't-find-a-clue-with-both-hands-and-Google?
Or maybe they've gotten better. I think I stopped reading them after about their seventh issue, their "fresh and edgy" layout seemed more "fucked-up and annoying" to me...
Just junk food for thought...
I'd use mod points, but I'm a designer (Web and print) and this has to be set straight. Besides, who on /. actually reads TFA to comprehend these posts?
Waa-aay back on the early printing presses, characters were steel/pewter “shots” and held together with molten lead. The shots were lead-alloy and would break-away from melting the pure lead once the print-run was complete.
The letters each occupied a rectangular space, since the shots were forged from rectangular molds. When the shots were fitted together on a line, they would have a specific amount of space between them which was largely based on their overall size. (the shots were three-dimensional, and therefore, actually had volume)
For the common, body-text type, the rectangular spaces (proportional to a letter's width) were enough to make the type readable. However, with larger type in the masthead, headline or other large type, the space between letters could sometimes lead to a confusing appearance. The larger letters were often made of wood, not metal, so the spaces would be cut-away near the corners. The notches that resulted made the angular letters (e.g., like ‘VA’ or ‘WAY”) fit-together more closely, and yet would not lose any space when placed next to letters that occupy the full rectangle. (such as with ‘AMV’, ‘MAN’, or ‘OMG’)
Since only the corners of certain letters were trimmed-away, it came to be known as “cornering”, which in-time became the vernacular we know today, kerning. Presumably, some Northern European dialect gives us the word we now use.
So many people confuse kerning with a system called tracking and think the two are one and the same... NOT so! While each is a name for a system to determine the visible space between letters, they do it in fully different ways. In a nutshell, tracking applies to a full typeface and is applied to all text at the same time. (as if to increase/decrease the size of the letter-shots themselves) Whereas kerning only applies to the space between two, specific letters.
In that light, you may have already guessed that kerning is not widely used with body-text (like the text you're reading now) and tracking is used instead. For instance, the next time you read a fully-justified column, (aligned both left and right sides) notice how some lines appear “stretched” or “compressed” when compared to others. Tracking is the mechanism for making justified text.
Where you'll find kerning most often is in mastheads, corporate logos, and occasionally in article headlines. Working with only two letters at a time is a tedious process, so it's generally reserved for when fewer letters are displayed at a larger size.
The very logo for Slashdot (top of this page) is a fair example of kerning; the letters are almost touching, but the same effect can not be done so precisely by simply adjusting the tracking of the same text. (even the slogan, “NEWS FOR NERDS, STUFF THAT MATTERS” is kerned just a bit)
What amuses me the most in this thread is the number of people claiming they can compare the effects of tracking or kerning from one poster to the next. Are you all using the exact-same font on your browser? (Slashdot posts appear in the default font for your browser--go ahead, test it!)
With the obvious variety of platforms represented here, I'd safely say “no”. Unless you're in the same room, looking at the same PC monitor, you can't make any comparisons. While the page reads the same, I'm sure it appears just-a-bit-different on my screen than it does on yours. There's no proof there.
Besides “Optical Volumes” does sound just a bit cooler than “Optical Areas”.
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
For sites you visit frequently, use greasemonkey (firefox extention) to rewrite the html/css yourself.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It constantly amazes me how advanced technologies get lost and ignored.
The Acorn (later ARM) range of RISC workstations (popular int eh UK) had an operating system RISC OS.
From version 1 it had a vector based font system that was pushed as the standard for all applications (open API).
From Version 2 all window text was drawn using the system (with anti-aliasing and hinting).
From Version 3.5 (1994) the RISC OS came with a web browser that used this font system.
The font system used vector fonts, supported full sub-pixel antialiasing and hinting and kerning pairs.
Here we are 14 years later and most implementations of font renderings on GUI's and Web Browsers look smudgy and kerning pairs are still missing.
links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
Is this mathematical proof that Comic Sans is the worst font ever?
I think you're absolutely right. Here are two examples:
==========
I just got done reading a long book as an eBook.
I then noticed a hardcopy at the library, checked it out, and started re-reading it -- and I definitely am getting more comprehension and retention out of it. In fact, it's almost as if I had not not read the book at all, rather than having just finished reading the book only one day before!!
Not to mention that the print copy is easier on the eyes. But it's not just because it's not on the computer screen:
===========
Couple weeks ago, at archive.org's new OpenLibrary project, I read an entire book online in one sitting. OpenLibrary shows you actual scanned pages as images, so you're seeing the exact same thing as you would if you held the paper book in your hands.
Amazingly, MY EYES *AND BRAIN* DID NOT GET TIRED the way they do with regular eBooks (and that's even tho I use an eBook reader that emulates a slightly yellowed paper book, and can use any font). As with any paper book, I could read as long as I wished. Conversely, with eBooks, I've found that after an hour or so I have *got* to go do something else.
After some thought, and a side-by-side comparison, I concluded that the entire reason was because the realbook's typeface was EFFORTLESS to read, whereas the computer font required work from both my eyes AND my brain (despite 13 years of experience with reading from computer screens). Compared to a visually-similar eBook display, the scanned actual pages were *restful* to read, and caused no eye or brain fatigue.
==========
So if I have a choice -- give me print from a real printing press. My eyes and brain will thank you.
One also has to wonder what computerized teaching is *failing* to get into kids' heads -- both by unduly fatiguing their eyes and brains, and by information not being as well comprehended and/or retained (which probably goes right along with the fatigue factor).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
READ MY .SIG!*
.sig is a Unix thing and, as such, should be in lower case as it's a case-sensitive filesystem.
* Ok, I know that
Now's the time to jump on it! Get it fixed!
Oh, and by the way, there's no reason "web fonts" can't have custom kerning -- it's supposed to be an abstract description language with the browser doing a local version of a "proper layout", whatever that means, and thus could include kerning. Programmers are lazy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Free support to create PDF in non-supporting application is simply "printing to PDF" type of converters (to print an application must be able to generate Postscript. Instead of sending the postscript down the USB cable like a normal laser printer, these exporter pack it inside a PDF file along with the other things needed - like embedding fonts and compressing images).
For Linux : most modern distribution automatically create such a filter as a possible printing target next to the actual hardware printers.
For Windows : There's a software called PDF Creator that creates such a virtual printing target. It's open source and free (and uses ghostscript as a PostScript engine).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>Could this be why some people still prefer newspapers and magazines to the Web?" To answer the question ... I prefer newspapers to the Web because the size of articles (and their position in relation to the front page) gives me a sense of the importance of a story. With Web articles, you can have an almost unlimited amount of information attached to a topic - some/most of it of questionable value. Because newspaper real estate costs so much, reporters are required to get to the point succinctly, otherwise the newspaper would go out of business. If a story is worthy, it gets more room. And as a reader, you can decide at a glance whether you want to read the whole thing. You don't get that sense with web articles.
Donate Your Speech
Monospaced, ragged right. That's the formula prescribed by Writer's Digest for the most successful submissions to editors, circa 1980. The easiest read (on the eyes and brain) is the most likely to be read, and so accepted. Having spent almost 5 years as an editor, reading way too much compared to what was good enough to print, I can tell you for a fact it's true. When you have 100 pages to read before bed, and you run across a manuscript that has
wordsruntogetherononeline
a n d t o o m u c h s p a c e
on the next, it slows you down, annoys you, and you trash it. Kerning is just one component, and one of proportional fonts. A such, the point is lost compared to the evidence, except there's precious little consideration given to web page readers, and so proportional fonts rule the bitwaves.
The problem makes more sense, paradoxically, when you consider that we don't read letters at a time, but rather words at a time. If we read letters at a time, the spacing between letters would be a significant factor for understanding a single word at a time. But we read 4 or so words at a time, and the spacing problem accumulates. Losing track of comphrehension because of this problem makes us have to stop and read those words in series (one at a time) instead of parallel (a phrase at a time). The cognitive effort involved bothers us. The brain is lazy and revolts at extra work.
If TFA says this, tough. I didn't read much of it. I've known this for a quarter century, from practical experience as well as studying language use as a cognitive psychologist.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
It should not be impossible to create a font language that borrows the strengths of Metafonts and OpenType. You want a language, because shapes don't necessarily scale uniformly and may be context-sensitive, but you want the language simple enough that fonts can be generated by mere mortals. Interpreters for fonts shouldn't be too bad - most modern machines are happy with interpreters for entire applications, so we're easily at the point where just-in-time font generation should not be an issue.
OpenDocument is a markup language. TeX and LaTeX are markup languages, albeit of a slightly different kind. Since there's a push to standardize on OpenDocument, it only makes sense for OpenDocument to be equal in power and versatility to TeX. No point in having a standard for documents if not all documents can be translated to that standard. (This doesn't mean OpenDocument should be used for all things, only that if there exist TeX documents that cannot be mapped into the OpenDocument format, we will outgrow OpenDocument too quickly. A standard should never be so constrained that people start to break it in order to do what they need to do.)
OpenOffice, KOffice, and all these other office packages, all have to have an engine for some of the core DTP functions. Web browsers used to have this problem, but there are now a few popular core engines and usually some sort of support for Mozilla plugins for non-Mozilla-based browsers. I don't see why the same method couldn't be used to solve DTP problems - perhaps have TeX or something similar as a plugin for regular wordprocessors to add the DTP functions. (That eliminates the need for wordprocessors to support DTP functions directly, which they usually do very badly at.)
Another option would be to get a group of real hardcore TeX hackers together to crunch out what should be LaTeX 3 and basically shock the typesetting community into getting off its collective backside. Shouldn't be too hard - it's not like it requires actually debugging LaTeX, it only requires producing a parser that can read LaTeX and write TeX. Which isn't horrible. Anything that's a macro is expanded, anything else is copied through. The expander should be trivial, the only difficult part would be to actually re-implement the macros - and that's only because there are so many of them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sustainability and energy independence essay
They'll do a report on how varying levels of background contrast effect the decision to adjust font weighting. Then they might consider leading and word spacing upon clarity vs. scanning, and maybe some word grouping and margin justification... Then they might realize that the alternating background thing may require some additional kerning they didn't think of before because of positive/negative spatial relationships.