> [T]he overwhelming thrust of the available evidence is
that there is no difference in the legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces either when reading from paper or when reading from screens. Typographers and software designers should feel able to make full use of both serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces, even if legibility is a key criterion in their choice.
Interesting! Does it touch on why people initially became so opinionated about serif/sans readability? And what’s a meaningful characteristic if not serifs?
- serif was claimed to lead to better horizontal tracking... so better for long prose readability
- sans serif was claimed to lead to better spot-recognition of characters... so better for spot-character/word recognition and legibility
Those effects were never very strong, and varied depending on the exact fonts in use (and for digital, font rendering characteristics).
There's also probably an effect based on what you're used to. If most of the books you read are serif (which they would be for older people, since almost all printed books were serif), and your exposure to sans serif was largely via the internet, and you don't like most of what's written on the internet, that might sway you toward serif. Conversely, if you mostly read modern internet text, you might have the opposite bias.
I can confirm the later effect; prior to the internet, my primary exposure to sans serif fonts were government documents and forms, and advertisements, neither of which inculcated an association with any virtues.
Perhaps you should compare government documents and forms from different governments. UK government forms are extraordinarily beautiful, and welcoming, and are easy to fill out. US government forms, on the other hand, seem almost calculated to be unfriendly, and are incredibly difficult to fill out even when you use supporting instructions. It almost seems like they have been deliberately designed so that they cannot be filled out without the assistance of a lawyer. Canadian forms seem pretty neutral, and practical, but are nowhere near as pleasant to fill out as UK forms are.
Most of those 160 pages, is repetitive mish mash of various historical research (many of questionable quality) on typeface readability loosely grouped by certain themes retold in a way that makes it even less clear about their results, quality and whether testing conditions are useful for making any good conclusions.
Little value in reading it all unless you follow references and read what the quoted research actually did and said. The chapters have different thematic, but content and conclusions are very samey -> a bunch of questionable research and research which was inconclusive or didn't observe significant overall advantage of serif vs sans serif.
As for where it came from to me it very much feels like the defense of serif typefaces is largely typographers defending existence of their craft and people talking past each other with overgeneralized claims. There is definitely value in the art and craft of typography and I respect that. It would be too bland if everything used plain sans serif fonts that barely differ from each other, and you can definitely mess up typography making text hard to read when done badly. But I also believe that there is plenty of things based on traditions and "everyone knows x because that's how we have always done it".
As for sans serif for screens the obvious reason and also thing that comes up multiple times is low resolution text. At certain resolution there are simply not enough pixels for serifs. The author of paper suggest that with modern high resolution screens this argument doesn't stand.
My personal opinion is that it's not a big issue at sufficiently high text size. But even on somewhat modern 2560x1440 screen I can find plenty of UI elements that have only 7-8 pixels high labels. Not everyone is using retina displays and not everything is long format text. Screen resolutions have increased, but so have information density compared to early computer screens, although there is recent trend of simplifying UI to the point of dumbing it down and adding excessive padding all over the place.
There are other screens beside computers and mobile phones, many of them not very high resolution even by standards of early computer screens. It doesn't make sense to put high resolution screen and Linux computer in every little thing. Problem is made worse by lack of antialised text sometimes due to screen, sometimes MCU memory and compute limitations. You are probably not going to have modern font rendering stack on something like black and white washing machine screen, gas station pump or thermostat
The research multiple times mentioned stuff like low resolution, but it hardly ever quoted hard numbers in a meaningful way. How many pixels a typeface needs to be comfortably represent serif? How many arcseconds? Surely there must be research related to that one. This might be part of problem for some comparative research - can't compare readability of serif/sans serif if there is no serif typeface at those resolution. Stuff like point 10 or point 12 without additional details is meaningless.
Some personal anecdote -> text antialising has huge effect. Made a sample text of serif and sans serif font and zoomed out to the point where lower case letters are ~6px high. I wouldn't expect there to be enough resolution for serif but you can perceive surprising amount of detail in letter shapes. Zoomed in on screenshot it's a blurry mess, but at normal zoom level the serif letters are fine. It's readable but wouldn't consider either of 2 comfortable. When scaled up to 8px both pieces were still harder to read than same height text in UI labels. Why is that? Why is one identical height sans serif text much more readable than other? Are UI labels better pixel aligned? Is it due to subpixel antialising? That's on a 90deg rotated screen, is subpixel antialising even working properly there?
Just for fun switch OS UI font to serif. Due to font sizing inconsistency it ended up being 1 pixel shorter (7px) than same size default UI font. Can those even be considered serifs when they are hardly a pixel each? It felt weird, nowhere near as bad I expected, but still weird.
On both cases it is based on some evidence even if they are completely different (one is a question of definition, another of measurement and observation): for Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit; for serif vs non-serif, argument is that serifs help with line tracking for eyes depending on the line spacing and line length.
For a meta-study finding a different result, it'd be great to qualify how was the previous research wrong so we learn something from it.
I've marked as something to pick up as I am very curious.
> For Pluto, it is a round lump of rock going around the Sun on it's own separate orbit
That was never the reason anyone got upset at it being "demoted", or else they'd be equally upset about all of the other ones that were never planets in the first place (which in fact are in fact the main argument for why it got reclassified). People just don't like change, especially for things that seem like "facts".
That's exactly my point: the previous response assumed the argument was made in "I don't like change matter", when a better interpretation is "I am OK with Pluto being a planet if all the other similar objects matching the same definition are planets or them all not being planets", or, in this context, "I'd really like to know why was previous opinion also based on research wrong".
I'd also note Pluto was discovered only in 1930, and people already accepted a change of "one extra planet" not 100 years ago, and I do not think people have changed that much since.
The previous theory was wrong because someone made it up on the basis of nothing. This is a very common event.
It is precisely analogous to the "dispute" over Pluto,¹ where the only argument was "I was taught in school that Pluto is a planet, which means it is true that Pluto is a planet". That is also the only argument for differential readability of serif vs non-serif fonts. It shouldn't surprise you that it turned out to be wrong.
¹ (The conclusions are not analogous - "Pluto is a planet" is not capable of being true or false when the definition of "planet" is up for debate. "Serifed fonts are more readable [under condition X]" is capable of being true or false. But the arguments are identical.)
There are more, but OP claims to dispute this study among others, and while I am very curios and have added it to my reading list, if somebody has already read and can highlight what was wrong with all the previous studies, that'd be great (that was the ask all along).
For instance, in this very study, Verdana (a sans serif font) is ranked best due to low mental effort, but an average reading speed is much better for serif fonts: I would like to see even larger x-height fonts than Georgia — eg. Baskerville — tested as well. Perhaps sans serif fonts are taken down by the worst ones.
I guess I'll need to read the OP's full 160 pages to get my answer.
Thank you, as much as a 160 page book about fonts is probably thrilling, I probably won’t get around to it for a while so was going to ask for the tl;dr
There is no compelling evidence that san-serif fonts are less readable than serif fonts under any circumstance, despite the oft-repeated lore that typographers consider serif fonts to be more readable than sans-serif fonts.
As an appellate litigator, I relish cases like this one because they show, beyond doubt, how trial judges everywhere often phone it in. They often pick a winner by gut feeling instead of reading the filed papers, doing their own research, thinking independently, and following the law.
