Check out the imminent issue #13 of TYPO magazine:
http://www.magtypo.cz/english.html

I think it's probably the most concerted treatment of readability (much more interesting than legility) in recent memory.

hhp

Too bad it isn

The only real way to measure font legibility is to create some sort of human factors cognitive research study.

Identify the font you want to test, and develop a hypothesis that you will test.

Create a set of stimuli that will be simple enough to clear response from your test population so you may test your hypothesis.

Assemble a test population and give them a pre-test that is designed to leave you with a fairly uniform population so any results can be attributed to that population, this will help future researchers working on similar material.

Administer the test and and do a statistical analysis of the results.

Rinse and repeat.

I think it's certainly possible to do sensical testing, but it's also extrememly difficult to do it right, at least in the realm of immersive reading (as opposed to just individual letters/words). And the main thing is that, in the absense of reliable empiricism, a typographer still has to make design decisions, he can't put his head in the sand. This is where plausible theorizing can be more useful than to "measure font legibility". That's what I've been trying to do in various ways myself, and my article in TYPO is a representative culmination of it all.

hhp

Issue 13 of TYPO is here. Amazing articles!, kudos Mr. Papazian.

Thanks!

BTW people, do purchase the print issue if you want to read it... immersively! :-)

hhp

BTW, what did you guys think of the font used to set my article?

hhp

I think it was Charter ITC :-)

No, Kevin's is in Charter, not mine.

hhp

I think the style of the typeface is fine and an interesting contribution to the argument of your article. The obvious conscious design decisions about letterform are generally reasonable, but the execution seems uneven, and some letters create a sense of arbitrariness, e.g. the splayed and imbalanced lowercase w, and I find it hard to consider that you might have intended them that way, since they don't seem to contribute to the readability of the face. The lowercase s seems too light. The open lower bowl of the g is fine, but the upper right transition of the same bowl is both heavy and awkward and is contrary to the 'movement' of the other letters. I don't think you gain anything from the lower right termination of the d that you would not gain from modelling it on the same area of the a. I think the top bowl of the e is a bit too large: I understand your desire to make it taller than 'normal', but I think you've overdone it a bit: the bar is optically pressing down into the lower part of the letter, an effect strengthened by the straight transition on the right. The giant white space in your fi ligature seems to me problematic in terms of 'bouma' shape; if you want to preserve the dot on the i, why not consider what Jelle Bosma did in Cambria and have a contextually substituted narrower f before i? I don't understand why the external serifs on the m are so much shorter than on the n: are serifs important to readability or not? Some letters are very nice: I especially like the lowercase c.

Thanks for the crit! But in order to avoid hijacking this thread [more] I think I'll "reflow" this tangent to the Patria thread. Again, thanks.

hhp

Check out here:
http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/BalanLegEcon.pdf

Hrant, I was very pleased to see Patria in print. I noticed it instantly when I picked up the print edition, and I must admit that I couldn't get through your article because I kept stopping to look at your letters.

I don't mean to say that your letters impede legibility; I do not think that they do. I just mean that I was so thrilled to see Patria in use that I lost interest in the text. This happens to me a lot

{Reflowed to Patria's crit...

hhp}

Hello,

For legibility, is anyone have some suggestions or nice research papers for character spacing setting?
I read one paper wrote by mark Jarma about the basic character spacing in type design. (Link as follow)

http://www.typeculture.com/academic_resource/articles_essays/pdfs/tc_article_20.pdf

So, apart from the basic idea, when typeface desiger design the character spacing of fonts, is there any other rules or considerations?

Or is there more suggestions from the psycology field?

Thanks for any advice!!

y

By the way, In the paper above, the author mentioned that after the basic idea of spacing setting, the fine-tuning should be considered. But each font design looks like have too much difference in character spacing setting, how comes?
y

>is there any other rules or considerations?

Mark Jamra's theory considers white space -- the area between characters. While this is most useful, there are other parameters of spacing, such as "near-point distance".

The extreme instance of near-point spacing is the setting, popular for advertising headlines set by phototypositor in the era c. 1965-85, known as "tight but not touching".

Some typefaces, in particular Goudy's Old Style (1920s), were designed for a tight fit, in metal setting, in text, so they excelled in the TBNT setting.

The light weights of Helvetica Neue (done in the TBNT era) are tightly fitted, with near-point spacing having a greater role to play than white-spacing.

It's also interesting to compare the metrics of the original Univers (not much kerning there) with the new version, especially concerning the lower-case "r".

Jamra rightly identifies the primary importance of using the judgement of one's eyes to determine "even rhythm", and, to continue the analogy musically, bear in mind that there are many different rhythms, some simple, others complex. Sure, you need a basic rhythm for legibility, but beyond that, the question is will the type march, skip, dance or drag its feet?

On line, Briem's web site with a tutorial on type design is lovely. Here is his discussion of spacing. It is based on the most often cited discussion of spacing, Walter Tracy's chapter in his Letters of Credit.

If you do a search on the topic here on Typophile, you will get a many interesting comments, such as Nick's above.