Joey wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
furthermore, they're being calculated in the wrong manner. when you break lines according to simple character-count, the underlying assumption is the use of a monospaced font.
and that's a bad assumption regarding people reading books, because nobody should read a book using a monospaced font; that's just inviting eye-strain and fatigue to ruin the experience.
with as loudly as people complain about the unpleasantness of on-screen reading, we must do everything we can to nudge 'em into an experience that lessens the irritation as much as possible.
I disagree with the above.
Personally, I find monospaced, serifed fonts to be the easiest to read, and am frequently frustrated by the lack of books that use a monospaced font, and I wonder who is to blame for it.
In all of the software usability testing that I've done over the years (mostly involving web applications), monospaced fonts consistently score the highest for readability and comfort with the users.
Do you have some pointers to research that might explain why the prevailing wisdom is that monospaced fonts are "bad"? I've tried various google searches, and only managed to discover results that agree with my position.
Over the years there's been fairly extensive experiments performed on a large sample of people who read printed text and where many typographic settings are varied. These people are tested for reading speed and reading comprehension, and asked about personal preferences. The most famous of these tests were those done by Tinker and associates (Bill Hill in his tome, "The Magic of Reading" refers a lot to these studies.) For example, some of the tested typographic settings included general font types (serif vs. sans serif), font spacing (proportional vs. monospace), font size, leading, line length, margins, text justification, etc., etc. Here (from my flawed memory) are some general typographic settings *in print* that maximize reading comprehension *and* are generally preferred (most comfortable). Of course, there are variations from individual to individual, but there are clearcut preferences of a large sample of people: Serif fonts (big factor) Font size 9-11 points Font spacing proportional (somewhat big factor) Line length about 30em (25-35em about the same) Text Justification: Fully justified (right and left) (big factor) Margins (so area of printed page is about 50-60% of the total area) Leading (can't remember the details, but what is found in a typical novel is optimum; double spaced text is preferred by few.) Some comments on the above. Serif definitely leads to better comprehension and higher speed reading because of how the human eye/brain comprehends glyphs -- the little serifs helps the eye/brain to more quickly identify the character and differentiate characters from one another leading to quicker reading of whole words "as a whole." (Without serifs, the brain has to oftentimes parse the characters individually in a word, to look at each character one by one, to determine the word, which slows down reading speed and comprehension.) If line lengths are too short, people have to switch their eyes too much, leading to fatigue and inability to become immersed in the text lowering reading speed and comprehension. If lengths are too long, people have more difficulty "tracking back" from the end of the line to the beginning of the next line (that is, to know which is the next line! Leading plays a role here.) Text which is NOT fully justified leads to substantial visual distraction and noticeably lowers reading comprehension (provided the right justification is done with high typographic quality and, where necessary, the use of hyphenation.) Of course, this is for print where the resolution of ink on paper approaches the "equivalent" of 600 dpi (computer screens are about 90-120 dpi). Low resolution screens change the rules somewhat. For example, sans serif fonts generally lead to better comprehension on low-rez screen since the serifs on serif fonts sometimes are lost or get too thin on lower resolutions screens. Nevertheless, I think a lot of the "rules" of typography in print still apply to ebook reading. For this reason, in the basic CSS style sheet used for the online version of "My Antonia", I set the line length to be 30 em and not fixed to a particular pixel length as most people do. Now certainly the CSS I use for "My Antonia" leaves a lot to be desired (I'm not a graphics designer -- the CSS styling I've seen for some of the PG/DP books is very good), but I do believe on many monitors the line length I've set is optimal for reading the text, except when the type size gets too large on very large monitors. See: http://www.openreader.org/myantonia/basic-design-nopagenum/myantonia.html (I've not set right justification, but could do so quite easily. The lack of a decent hyphenation engine in most browsers makes right justification more difficult to achieve reasonably well. I think, though, that for line lengths specified to be 30-35 em, that right justification could be used in browser presentation and look good most of the time.) [Btw, in "My Antonia" I also use curly quotes, which studies suggest improves reading comprehension and which, in print, people overwhelmingly prefer. (I personally find it odd the large number of people who don't like curly quotes for online texts, but maybe that is a result of low resolution screens and bad fonts. I think for "My Antonia" the curly quotes improve comprehension and leads to a more pleasing presentation, but then I'm just one person.)] I could go on and talk about other related matters. But the point is that what is important is not what one person likes the best, but what makes sense based upon experiment over a large number of people. Fortunately with reflowable formats (typeset on the user's end, such as envisioned for OpenReader), the end-user can and should be given substantial ability to tailor the typographic presentation to what *they* prefer. That's one reason why I don't care much for PDF for on screen reading (at least unstructured/untagged) since it *forces* typography on end-users, and usually is not optimal for a large percentage of readers due to screen limitations and greatly varying screen size. Jon Noring (p.s., Bill Hill talks about another factor in reading comprehension and ability to achieve "immersive" reading, and that is due to human physiology. In human vision, the center vision is used for visual acuity, to resolve fine details like print. However, the peripheral vision (which is of low visual acuity) is optimized to sense motion (e.g., to look for threats such as from animals trying to eat us.) Thus, immersive reading is more difficult to achieve when the human eye continues to see complex "detail" in the peripheral vision, such as found in many ebook reading systems with lots of menus, buttons, tables of contents along the sides, etc. The subconscious perceives this "busyness" as possibly hiding a threat. This is one reason I tend to dislike Adobe Acrobat Reader: it is "too" busy in the peripheral vision, at least for the default setting of Reader. The ergonomic design of ebook reading systems should take into account the need to minimize unwanted distractions in the peripheral vision. For example, look at the "My Antonia" document (see URL above) where the outside of the page area is kept a solid dark blue color -- this was intentional. Many web designers would format this outside area to look "eye candy", to add repeating graphics images or a floating menu, for example. To essentially fill up the space with "stuff". But doing so is distracting, and makes it more difficult for many readers to achieve the highly immersive reading (called "ludic" reading.) Reading a book *is* a different experience than reading a typical corporate web site, and the styling needs to be different.)