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Best Font for Online Reading: No Single Answer

229 points by JW_00000 4y ago

cheese_van 4y ago
I do have font preferences but my greater preference is background color. I've found that hex color #FEF0DF as a background tires me less. For reference, it's roughly the Financial Times background. Calibre allowing me to set the background color to my preference is a godsend for a heavy reader. HN's background is pretty good also. Anyone know the hex?
- jaredwiener 4y ago
  #f6f6ef -- right in the HTML
  - ARandomerDude 4y ago
    I think the parent was saying "I like a color somewhat similar to FT's background," not "I wish I could have FT's background color but I can't figure out how to get it."
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      GGP explicitly asked for the HN background color at the end of his comment.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  HN's background is too light. Try #EDD1B0 instead (R 237 G 209 B 176).
- layer8 4y ago
  > I do have font preferences but my greater preference is background color. Same here, I always want #000 on #FFF, so that I can take full advantage of my display’s contrast ratio.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    On paper or e-ink, this approach makes sense. On a backlit screen, maximum contrast ratio also means maximum difference in the amount of light emitted, which can be unpleasant.
- ChrisGranger 4y ago
  Firefox has a handy color picker called Eyedropper in its Browser Tools menu. I'm not sure about other browsers.
pvinis 4y ago
Did we need a study for this? Next study: "Study for best colorscheme for coding: no single answer".. Kidding aside, it makes sense. No best option, just options optimized for different things.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  Do you just hate scientific research or something?
  - pvinis 4y ago
    on the contrary, I think it's great. But I don't think it's beneficial for anyone when it's phrased as "looking for the best X", especially on things that are obviously not going to have a "best" thing, like fonts. Tradeoffs everywhere. Don't you think a title like "A comparison of fonts for online reading" or something would be more fitting?
slowhand09 4y ago
Came here to say "duhhh..." but the article is actually interesting, especially to those early web usability followers of Jacob Nielsen (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/author/jakob-nielsen/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/author/jakob-nielsen/)
paulpauper 4y ago
HN font is good
- Isthatablackgsd 4y ago
  It is Verdana for those who wants to know the font in HN.
AnthonBerg 4y ago
For me the best font for reading online is on paper, outside, in the winter, Doves Type. Or SF Pro Rounded from Apple. If I can’t read “online” by printing it on paper, I read on a well-calibrated display that casts the same light to all viewing angles, and 120Hz variable-refresh-rate. With macOS’ font rendering. I’m sure this is a perfectly unique combination of “best”.
- drBonkers 4y ago
  What's your workflow for getting digital text into print? Additionally, what display do you use and how do you ensure it's calibrated?
  - AnthonBerg 4y ago
    Ha!, it hadn’t occurred to me to call it a workflow – but it is, I guess. Sometimes it’s just hitting Print in the browser. Sometimes I turn on Safari’s Reader view and print that. For some reason, things printed on the Booklet setting tend to get read sooner. (“Booklet” is a macOS printing feature. It prints two pages on each sheets and orders them so the pile of paper can be keel-stapled into a booklet. Some printer drivers have it too, and Acrobat Reader as well I believe.) I try to have fonts set to those two ones I mentioned. Through overrides or preferences. On occasion I’ve converted to Markdown and applied a stylesheet. This seems to work. I read a bit more. Get around to it easier. It might be the ritual, it might be the result. Probably both. I tend to be quite picky about monitors, though I wish I wasn’t. (It’s a handicap, being this fussy!) The models I end up buying tend to be pretty well calibrated from the factory. LG IPS monitors are good. Right now I have an LG CX 55” OLED TV as my programming display. It is very good. It’s fussy to set up; macOS doesn’t support HDMI 2.1 so right now it isn’t possible to get full, crisp 4:4:4 color and 120Hz at the same time. I go with 120Hz 4:2:0; Some color/background combos are noticeably blurry, but the fluidity of 120Hz is so, so nice. I don’t agree with it or want it to be that way, but it is :) I want a color calibrator. Haven’t got one yet. I have borrowed one on occasion from a photographer friend. I find that it makes a difference. There isn’t a glaringly obvious difference, but everything feels tighter and more relaxed at the same time. Grays are more neutral, colors are more vividly themselves. It’s easier on the brain? Kind of like putting fresh tires on a car. Or working in a quieter place. It adds up. Last time I looked at color calibration devices, the info over at the DisplayCAL site seemed to be very good: https://displaycal.net/ https://displaycal.net/
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
This is like that Malcolm Gladwell story about the best spaghetti sauce. There is no one size fits all - different people like different things. https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_and_spaghetti_sauce?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  It's probably about the font just being well designed, having consistent kerning ans whatnot. Same as with design guidelines. Every couple years something new comes along and is better than anything before. We had an intern a few years ago who was still working on his masters and also made some money on the side with "web stuff". He wouldn't stop talking about material design, how it is the best ever and how every margin and padding is scientifically proven to be perfect to the pixel, the blue they picked is perfection, how rounded corners and 3D effects on buttons are fatiguing to the eye, and so on and so on. I guess it was the first time this fellow consciously witnessed the release of a web design framework. It was near impossible to convince him that using bootstrap is just as good, and while certain rules for ratios between paddings, margins and font sizes exist it's much more important your theme is consistent, and that you apply it consistently.
  - wmeredith 4y ago
    This is pretty much what happens to anyone who enthusiastically enters a new field. You can tell when someone both cares about typography and is lacking in experience when they start talking about how Comic Sans is the worst font ever made or Helvetica is the best font ever made. They're both excellent fonts when used as intended.
- redmen 4y ago
  I find it amazing that people ever think that there might be a one-size-fits-all solution to a subjective human experience. Spaghetti Sauce, Fonts. Sure no one likes dog crap in their sauce, so there are obvious experiences no one likes, but to assume that there is one single one that everyone likes? Sometimes we get so nearsighted that by reframing the question it seems obvious.
nerdponx 4y ago
I wish this article included some discussion of serifs on "I" and generally of distinguishing "I" and "l". It's a shame that Clear Sans and Verdana were not included, because they do have a serif "I".
jdrc 4y ago
the answer is verdana, but they didnt test it. I dont think this study is well done. Fonts are learned over time, and people's performance will improve, but differently. There's definitely certain fonts that are optimal.
- Daneel_ 4y ago
  I agree. I couldn’t help wondering while reading the article if older users are faster with serifed fonts and younger users are faster with sans-serif fonts, however they never touched on it.
  - gen3 4y ago
    > A second interesting age-related finding from the new study is that different fonts performed differently for young and old readers. The authors set their dividing line between young and old at 35 years, which is a lower number than I usually employ, but possibly quite realistic given the age-related performance deterioration they measured. > 3 fonts were actually better for older users than for younger users: Garamond, Montserrat, and Poynter Gothic. The remaining 13 fonts were better for younger users than for older users, which is to be expected, given that younger users generally performed better in the study. They kinda did touch on it. From what I can see, letter sizing and kerning looks to make more of a difference.
- aggie 4y ago
  Is there a better study you can point to? From what I remember looking into this topic the research has always provided ambiguous results with lots of context-dependence.
- layer8 4y ago
  Seconding Verdana, especially on low-DPI screens.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  I think the answer was Verdana years ago but not so much today with higher dpi screens. Verdana was designed for CRTs around 800x600, with wide letter forms and kerning, to get ample spacing between glyph elements. It's the champion of readability in that format, but on a modern 1920+ display with subpixel rendering rather than an aperture grill, Verdana feels too big and clunky.
ZYinMD 4y ago
If you do CSS you'd know the best fonts for 16px isn't the best fonts for 18px, and definitely not the best fonts for H1 H2 etc. The Verdana font that HN and reddit uses are pretty good for reading in small text.
skilled 4y ago
Isn't Georgia a very popular font? Interesting to see it isn't mentioned anywhere. It's the preferred font choice for me, but I know a lot of editorials also use it (or a variation of it).
- ghaff 4y ago
  The font choices are a little odd. There are a number I'm not familiar with or have maybe heard of in passing. But probably Georgia and Verdana in particular seem to be missing. The delta between Helvetica and Arial also seems a little strange. Yes, there are a few type-nerd differences but AFAIK (feel free to correct) they're basically the same font.
  - SamBam 4y ago
    > The delta between Helvetica and Arial also seems a little strange. That, along with the basically random ordering of the fonts in the final results (i.e. there is absolutely no metric you could order them by to even roughly match the order produced) is what triggers my BS alarm about this whole thing.
timonoko 4y ago
1. xkcd-script.ttf 2. Opera Lyrics Smooth 3. Crete Round All others should be banned. Especially creepy spidery fonts on some ebooks.
laristine 4y ago
I like that the article about best reading font research itself has Arial as its font.
zwieback 4y ago
Never really thought about it before reading this article but I think I prefer different fonts for different content: strong preference for clean sans-serif mono fonts for coding, something like Arial for general purpose content and something old fashioned with serifs for literature/artsy content.
Sunspark 4y ago
The answer to this question depends on the resolution of the display, the weight of the font, and a person's idiosyncrasies--e.g. nearsightedness. I use a different font for online reading, coding and reading ebook on high-resolution phone display. All 3 are different, and are different sizes and weights.. the purpose is different. You know what really helps? Don't have white as a background. I die now without the Dark Reader browser extension.
- simion314 4y ago
  >Don't have white as a background. I would say that more important is to check your cool design in a normal screen and not on your super expensive designer monitor. Too often I see light gray text on light background, probably is only readable on the designer screen.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- layer8 4y ago
  > Don't have white as a background. That reduces contrast, which makes text harder to read for me. Today’s prevalent IPS displays have a rather low contrast ratio (typically only 1:1000). Please don’t lower it further by styling text as dark gray on light gray. If black on white looks too bright, you probably have set your screen brightness too high.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  It is indeed curious that you say “it depends” and then immediately make a strong, exceedingly opinionated recommendation. White (whether #fff or something close) is a very good background for most people on most devices. And as a sweeping generalisation, dark-on-light works better than light-on-dark.
zwieback 4y ago
Good place to ask this: what about the "standard" academic paper font(s) from the LaTeX tradition. I hate it but it gives an immediate gravitas to anything.
tristor 4y ago
The default font on a Kindle, Bookerly, is pretty great, honestly. Of the ones in the article, I think Lato suits me best.
brimble 4y ago
One of the worst things to happen to web usability was the shift away from the user deciding how pages look. In an ideal world the Web ecosystem would have grown up such that nearly all pages respect user configured font and color choices. Then, it wouldn't much matter which font the page creator decided was best, since the user's browser would automatically override it.
- pitaj 4y ago
  This died mostly because the defaults were so terrible.
  - new_stranger 4y ago
    This died because convention > configuration Most users do not want to configure fonts or anything really to use the web.
    - brimble 4y ago
      This could have ended up as a few simplified settings, as presented to most users... as we have with light and dark modes. Colorblind themes (for multiple kinds of colorblindness, say), high-readability themes for people who need the large-print editions of books, that kind of thing. Doesn't have to mean making everyone pick exact point values for every type of H tag, or whatever. A few presets in a dropdown could be really helpful—again, just look how everyone goes nuts over something as simple as having a "dark mode" setting.
    - cupofpython 4y ago
      I think it is deeper than personal want. i have a feeling that the more people communicate to each other about something, the more they value their personal experience to be relatable. Every customization makes your experience less relatable.
      - abraxas 4y ago
        Wow, I never thought about that in this category. Thanks for this insight.
rbanffy 4y ago
I really like the readability of avionics screens and their recommendations. I like their simple, mostly monospaced fonts and the uncluttered display panes. I'd love if more monitoring applications used that. edit: https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/ac_25-11b.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/... has some interesting guidelines.
- copperx 4y ago
  The lack of antialiasing in many avionics systems is highly detrimental for reading, in my opinion. The use of monospace makes numeric differences more salient, which I assume is a safety advantage. In any case, nobody is reading many words off avionics.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    No. They are more related to the "glanceable" displays mentioned in the article.
- orlp 4y ago
  You'll like https://b612-font.com https://b612-font.com then.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I actually dislike this font - it reminds me of Microsoft console fonts. I love its name, however.
layer8 4y ago
The article doesn’t address font rendering engines, screen DPI and panel type, and font size, which are important factors for which fonts work better than others. But they are right in the conclusion that user customization is needed.
cromniomancer 4y ago
gnicholas 4y ago
Very interesting takeaways regarding different results among old and young: > The takeaway is that, if your designers are younger than 35 years but many of your users are older than 35, then you can’t expect that the fonts that are the best for the designers will also be best for the users. > the differences in reading speed between the different fonts weren’t very big for the young users. Sure, some fonts were better, but they weren’t much better. On the other hand, there were dramatic differences between the fastest font for older users (Garamond) and their slowest font (Open Sans). In other words, picking the wrong font penalizes older users more than young ones.
- ChristianGeek 4y ago
  There was also the suggestion near the end to cut the number of words for older readers, which is just ridiculous.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I work in the world of dyslexia and assistive technology. I find it unfortunate that people (including folks who work on WCAG) emphasize using simple words and short sentences as the primary ways to accommodate dyslexic readers. These strategies are helpful in making text easier to understand, but they also undermine the nuance of communication. Before doing this, designers should think about how text is laid out so that it can be made maximally accessible in its original form.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > I find it unfortunate that people (including folks who work on WCAG) emphasize using simple words and short sentences as the primary ways to accommodate dyslexic readers. These strategies are helpful in making text easier to understand, but they also undermine the nuance of communication. I think that's a great point. Simplifying meaning for dyslexic and older readers seems condescending and just awful, depriving them of access to the world and degrading them. However, rather than simplify meaning, we can simplify its representation, the text: Better writing produces simpler text and that takes effort. Mark Twain (might have) said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." George Orwell's rules echo many experts: [1] * Never use a Metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never use a long word where a short one will do * If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out * Never use the Passive where you can use the active. * Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a Jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. * Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous Again, thought and effort are required. I've always thought it good writing but hadn't considered accessibility. Write better, more succinctly, and help readers in more ways than one - and yourself too. [1] Politics and the English Language (1946) [though I didn't see the original quote] Better writing - which requires more labor -
ad8e 4y ago
Big warning: their summary is "Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst." This is completely wrong and comes from an abuse of statistics. See the original research at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e6428 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e6428 An understandable explanation: imagine having 5 dice. You roll each die 4 times, then compare the highest sum to the lowest sum. Then you report that the highest die rolls 35% higher than the lowest. This is what the authors did, with each die being a font. But the experiment does not actually show evidence of any difference. If you rolled 500 dice, this method could claim that the highest dice are 200% higher than the lowest, even though all dice are still equal. The original authors seem aware of this shortcoming, but did it anyway: "we are somewhat stretching the applicability of a Cohen’s d analysis for this data". This is likely because they did not know of a better method. But it is wrong to be pushing this analysis. The main author is from industry, so perhaps he was unaware that this effect can be corrected for, or that this type of misleading claim is malpractice. But someone in the chain of publishing - the journal editors, the reviewers, the large author list, or Jakob Nielsen who is promoting this - should have caught this. It is their main result! In the absence of legitimate statistics, the article's circumstances point to a failure to detect measurable differences between fonts. There are two ways fonts may be better than each other: 1. across the population, so that one font is better for everyone 2. personalized, so that different fonts are better for different people The first case should be easily detectable, and the second case should see some correlation between preference and speed because of a familiarity bias (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e7351 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e7351). These are the Bayesian expectations I walked in with. Neither of these appear supported by the article, although I have only skimmed it. To be clear, the experiment does not give evidence that fonts perform equally either. It looks more likely that the experiment design failed.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Reading the article, what valuable things can we learn? Imperfection exists in everything in the universe - even the ideas in our minds we sometimes imagine to be ideal and perfect, but they turn imperfect as soon as we write them down (this cursed keyboard!). Imperfection does not destroy all value, or we live caves and aren't communicating using an imperfect alphabet and language, over imperfect signals, using imperfect power, etc etc. (in fact, we would be dead in the caves). Reading and learning from imperfection is the defintion of 'reading and learning', because there's nothing else to read. If I listened to HN comments, very little research would have value, very little information would be worth reading. The top comment is almost always of this nature; it's depressing to me that it still happens; we all should be very familiar by now with social media and these patterns, yet we keep following them. > I have only skimmed it [the OP]. Maybe that should be at the top of the comment. Imagine an OP which presented a detailed analysis and then, at the bottom, said 'I only skimmed the thing I analyzed' - imagine what the top comment would say.
dandongus 4y ago
Personally speaking, I think it's kind of silly that this article neither mentioned screen resolution nor the font rendering differences inherent to various operating systems.
leobg 4y ago
Much more important than the font, to me, is font size and line width. Plus, for anything of article length, ability to take and export highlights. That’s why I import all longer form text into Voice Dream Reader. Browser just isn’t the place for reading imo.
- illwrks 4y ago
  100%. Line length, line-height and text-size in relation to my distance to the screen are key to comfortable reading.
munk-a 4y ago
Their study excluded Courier New, how rude! But I love reading text with an absolute lack of kerning & multi-character sigils. (I mean this non-sarcastically just to be clear) I've always found that reading wide text comes at very little legibility cost, personally, so I try and consume data in mono-space whenever possible.
antiterra 4y ago
> People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age. How can this be anywhere near a useful or accurate statistic? Surely the rates depend on the age, and there’s likely space for significant improvement in someone’s 20s. I can read in the neighborhood of 750wpm with good comprehension while verbalizing. I’m pretty sure I never was able to read at 900wpm no matter how many years you go back. I don’t think there’s been any meaningful drop at all in the past 20 years. Further, in the next 20 years I wouldn’t be surprised if my reading speed took a huge hit, say 30%-50% (or more.) Even if that averaged out to 10% per year, it would be a misleading statistic. That’s also ignoring comprehension and reading level. At 30, I could focus throughout tearing through a Homeric epic and retain a huge amount about the text, including themes, symbolism, metaphors of note, etc. I couldn’t do anything like that at 20, even if my raw reading speed was faster.
bluenose69 4y ago
I'm not sure the fonts are the sole consideration, anyway. Let's talk about diagrams. The original article (https://doi.org/10.1145/3502222 https://doi.org/10.1145/3502222) uses the click-a-thumbnail scheme for figures. I'm sure this is the decision of the journal, but it is really quite annoying, since you lose context. The actual figures are in the authors' control, however, and they are not very clear. Take Figure 2, for a start, which combines an overly small font and low-contrast colours, reducing legibility for no good reason that I can discern. The PDF is a lot easier to read, as is common with online journals. I'm not sure how many people will bother trying to read such a long document online, as it is formatted. But sometimes I think the point of such studies is simply to get cited, and this is an ideal paper from that point of view: the title states something that is likely obvious to most people, so this might get cited by quite a few people who don't bother to read the details.
tasuki 4y ago
I find it hard to believe that Open Sans has the worst readability of all the tested fonts. I'm pretty sure the humanist Open Sans is faster to read than the geometric Avant Garde. With Garamond winning, what about Palatino and other old-style typefaces? There's a million generic sans-serifs in the study and not a single Didone? Mind, I wouldn't bet on it, but it'd be a more interesting comparison...
- mark-r 4y ago
  I was surprised by that too, along with the low standing of Avenir. Those are the most beautiful sans serifs. P.S. I don't think screen resolution is high enough yet to do justice to a Didone.
a-dub 4y ago
> The test stimuli were at an approximate 8th grade reading level, which matches our recommendation for web content targeted at a broad consumer audience. that's depressing to read. but i suppose different people have different strengths.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  >that's depressing to read congratulations! Depressing reading is second year of college level!
  - a-dub 4y ago
    that's an even more depressing thought.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      tsk, nobody appreciates Sylvia Plath anymore.
magios 4y ago
as usual, it is up to personal preference, but I've used Unifont, specifically Unifont CSUR, a bitmap font, tho in ttf form, as my sole font across the system, terminal, vim and web browser (firefox) which allows me to enforce a singular font in webpages by disabling font downloads, rotation and scaling. for me, it appears that having text align to a grid and not have any annoying ligatures or oversized characters makes it more readable.
Epiphany21 4y ago
The characters we use to interact with our computers were mostly designed to be hand-written and minimize the amount of movement your hand has to make going from one letter to the next. I theorize that they don't translate all that well to existing display technologies. Not so much because of the shape of the fonts, but because format isn't conducive to sharing or receiving information as quickly as our machines and our wetware could allow. If you think about this a little more, programming is actually a way to overcome the limitations of spoken/written languages to an extent, since the machine can parse the text faster than you, and it can read other forms of data that are even more efficient. In my view a monitor displaying human-readable text is similar to a legacy ABI that's kept around because of the technical momentum and mindshare it has, not because it's particularly good.
- Psyladine 4y ago
  >since the machine can parse the text faster than you You had me up until there; the machine doesn't know jack about text. It knows arrays and sequences of numbers according to the rules we've defined them by, for it. Yuo cna reda tihs raedliy btu teh copmtuer cna't. Your brain is trained by billions of years of evolution for symbolic parsing and pattern pairing, and language is just one flex of that muscle. Where computers thrive is where we've done the hard work to break down the syllabic system that is inherent to our biology into mathematical abstractions that can be computed by addition. Computers are great at solving problems we've already done, and repeating the steps, nothing more. Our machines are beautiful, well designed levers. But they don't move anything, they leverage our movement.
  - anonuser123456 4y ago
    >Yuo cna reda tihs raedliy btu teh copmtuer cna't. It would be interesting to see what GPT3 would do with this statement. Edit; just tried it. GPT-3 chatbot understood it instantly.
    - Psyladine 4y ago
      Cutting edge language processing algorithms trained by professionals in a herding manner for years ought to produce something that solves what is basically a parlor trick of language. It might even be a cheat-around on encoded rules but I don't have the paper. Still I'm willing to go out on an increasingly thin limb and say GPT3 is still playing a really big game of mad libs, and its 'understanding' of the language is more akin to the extremely rudimentary mathematical factoring of sentence structure and grammatical rules. That is, it could be trained to recycle on what others have done for poetry, and spit out something that sounds like what we've read that we call poetry, but it isn't putting poetry out, because it doesn't know what that means...not in like a conscientious way, but a literal, it has no "idea" which to express through a medium, it's just transcribing according to rules, not from say, first principles which then are interpreted through rules. Again, too much to demand of a really fast adding machine anyway.
ggm 4y ago
depends what you're reading. fixed-width fonts make some inputs easier, like code, and data. So if the word "read" means solely flow text, I can buy an argument the pretty fonts have value which goes to character recognition, kerning, ligatures and the role of caps and serif. If the word "read" includes "do a rapid scan of a column of data to confidence check it makes sense" or "find the longest number (==longest string) in a list of unsorted numbers" then fixed width will score higher than almost any other quality in my opinion. My reading of the history of fonts suggests some people thought italianate styled writing was a mistake. florid, and hard to read. to my eyes gothic is sometimes impenetrably hard to read.
gerdesj 4y ago
It's almost as though people are individuals. The write up (OP) often reads like an apology but I think that is wrong too. For example, some fonts favour certain eye conditions. So me at 51ish with shortsightedness in both eyes and some pronounced astigmatism in one of them and also general "degradation" will have some different ideas about a decent font than someone with 20/20 vision or my old mum who had rather better than that (plus longsightedness) At the moment, I need a new pair of specs which I have held off from due to the virus but my reading speed is mostly down to text size rather than typeface. Incidentally, a font/fount is an exemplar of a typeface but who's quibbling?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
armchairstats 4y ago
Last author is the same guy who did the "Glanceable Fonts" stuff at MIT https://www.nngroup.com/articles/glanceable-fonts/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/glanceable-fonts/
ncmncm 4y ago
No single answer? Sure there is. It's called Linux Libertine. There you go.
userbinator 4y ago
In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average). Faster because "I hate this font and I want to stop looking at text in it as soon as I can"? I remember reading how all-uppercase letters can make people read faster, but also make them miss misspellings more frequently because it's more annoying to read all-uppercase text.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
This is great supporting evidence in favor of reintroducing user-selectable stylesheets, along with better UI to allow more users to take advantage of the feature. Remember when Opera Browser let you switch to user-style mode with one click or keypress?
ximm 4y ago
I could not find the raw data anywhere. Is it really missing from the original paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222)? I would have really liked to analyse the data myself, but this way I cannot take this research serious.
chrysostom 4y ago
They tested the same typeface twice. Noto Sans is an extended family of fonts based on Open Sans that covers more languages. The design of their glyphs is exactly the same (being Open Sans). Yet the results place Open Sans last at 254 WPM, and Noto Sans 8th at 272 WPM…
- idlewan 4y ago
  Doing a visual comparison (tab flipping between https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans and https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans&preview.text=Whereas%20recognition%20of%20the%20inherent%20dignity&preview.text_type=custom https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans&... , aligning the sample text exactly), I could notice some differences though: - The 'g' character was changed, they are quite different - For the regular (400) weight, Noto Sans is slightly bolder but also more compact But you're definitely right, most character shapes look directly inherited from one to the other. I wonder if the weight & letter spacing change can explain the reading speed differences, or if measurement error / random jitter is actually what explains the different average speed in the study between the two.
- spyder 4y ago
  Their difference is mentioned in the paper (and they're saying it's the other way around: Open Sans derived from Noto Sans): "Open Sans is a general use font derived from Noto Sans. Typographers designed Noto Sans for the small screens on Android devices. " And they mention Noto Sans having hinting for that: "Also, five fonts have hinting (i.e., are engineered for reading on screens with low resolutions): Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, Noto Sans, and Times."
  - chrysostom 4y ago
    > "Open Sans is a general use font derived from Noto Sans. Typographers designed Noto Sans for the small screens on Android devices." Unless I'm missing something, that's not quite right. Open Sans, designed by Steve Matteson, was released in 2011. Noto Sans, commissioned by Google to cover a wide array of languages, was first released in 2013. Similarly there is a Noto Serif, based on Droid Serif. Open Sans itself goes back to Droid Sans, an earlier design by Matteson. Anyhow, whichever way it is, the point is that both typefaces share the same design. But you're right, the typefaces are not exactly the same. Here's a visual comparison: http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Open%20Sans&second=Noto%20Sans&p=1 http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Open%20Sans&seco... As idlewan pointed out above, the lowercase "g" is different, and so is the uppercase "I." There is also a slight weight difference. As you mention, the authors of the paper also note that Noto Sans is hinted, whereas Open Sans presumably is not. So I am wrong in my comment above to call it "the same" typeface. The changes are very subtle though, so it's interesting to see the difference in performance. Also worth noting is that they tested Arial and Helvetica (http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Arial&second=Helvetica&q=Go http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Arial&second=Hel...), both hinted and almost identical in weight. Helvetica ranked 4th (283 WPM) and Arial 11th (270 WPM).
rcarmo 4y ago
I’ve been using Georgia for ages, since it exists almost everywhere and has distinct serifs that (in my case at least) help distinguish between some letter forms. But I’ve never found a good sans-serif equivalent that looked good on a page with it.
halz 4y ago
The Lexend group was formed out of research on second grade students (US) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/] that lead them to a font design [https://design.google/library/lexend-readability/ https://design.google/library/lexend-readability/] that apparently showed improved reading proficiency. A 'world-script' version of the font family is also published as Readex Pro [https://github.com/ThomasJockin/readexpro https://github.com/ThomasJockin/readexpro]

229 points by JW_00000 4y ago

I do have font preferences but my greater preference is background color. I've found that hex color #FEF0DF as a background tires me less. For reference, it's roughly the Financial Times background. Calibre allowing me to set the background color to my preference is a godsend for a heavy reader. HN's background is pretty good also. Anyone know the hex?

jaredwiener 4y ago
#f6f6ef -- right in the HTML
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  I think the parent was saying "I like a color somewhat similar to FT's background," not "I wish I could have FT's background color but I can't figure out how to get it."
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    GGP explicitly asked for the HN background color at the end of his comment.
Sunspark 4y ago
HN's background is too light. Try #EDD1B0 instead (R 237 G 209 B 176).
layer8 4y ago
> I do have font preferences but my greater preference is background color. Same here, I always want #000 on #FFF, so that I can take full advantage of my display’s contrast ratio.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  On paper or e-ink, this approach makes sense. On a backlit screen, maximum contrast ratio also means maximum difference in the amount of light emitted, which can be unpleasant.
ChrisGranger 4y ago
Firefox has a handy color picker called Eyedropper in its Browser Tools menu. I'm not sure about other browsers.

pvinis 4y ago

Did we need a study for this? Next study: "Study for best colorscheme for coding: no single answer".. Kidding aside, it makes sense. No best option, just options optimized for different things.

humanistbot 4y ago
Do you just hate scientific research or something?
- pvinis 4y ago
  on the contrary, I think it's great. But I don't think it's beneficial for anyone when it's phrased as "looking for the best X", especially on things that are obviously not going to have a "best" thing, like fonts. Tradeoffs everywhere. Don't you think a title like "A comparison of fonts for online reading" or something would be more fitting?

slowhand09 4y ago

Came here to say "duhhh..." but the article is actually interesting, especially to those early web usability followers of Jacob Nielsen (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/author/jakob-nielsen/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/author/jakob-nielsen/)

paulpauper 4y ago

HN font is good

Isthatablackgsd 4y ago
It is Verdana for those who wants to know the font in HN.

AnthonBerg 4y ago

For me the best font for reading online is on paper, outside, in the winter, Doves Type. Or SF Pro Rounded from Apple. If I can’t read “online” by printing it on paper, I read on a well-calibrated display that casts the same light to all viewing angles, and 120Hz variable-refresh-rate. With macOS’ font rendering. I’m sure this is a perfectly unique combination of “best”.

drBonkers 4y ago
What's your workflow for getting digital text into print? Additionally, what display do you use and how do you ensure it's calibrated?
- AnthonBerg 4y ago
  Ha!, it hadn’t occurred to me to call it a workflow – but it is, I guess. Sometimes it’s just hitting Print in the browser. Sometimes I turn on Safari’s Reader view and print that. For some reason, things printed on the Booklet setting tend to get read sooner. (“Booklet” is a macOS printing feature. It prints two pages on each sheets and orders them so the pile of paper can be keel-stapled into a booklet. Some printer drivers have it too, and Acrobat Reader as well I believe.) I try to have fonts set to those two ones I mentioned. Through overrides or preferences. On occasion I’ve converted to Markdown and applied a stylesheet. This seems to work. I read a bit more. Get around to it easier. It might be the ritual, it might be the result. Probably both. I tend to be quite picky about monitors, though I wish I wasn’t. (It’s a handicap, being this fussy!) The models I end up buying tend to be pretty well calibrated from the factory. LG IPS monitors are good. Right now I have an LG CX 55” OLED TV as my programming display. It is very good. It’s fussy to set up; macOS doesn’t support HDMI 2.1 so right now it isn’t possible to get full, crisp 4:4:4 color and 120Hz at the same time. I go with 120Hz 4:2:0; Some color/background combos are noticeably blurry, but the fluidity of 120Hz is so, so nice. I don’t agree with it or want it to be that way, but it is :) I want a color calibrator. Haven’t got one yet. I have borrowed one on occasion from a photographer friend. I find that it makes a difference. There isn’t a glaringly obvious difference, but everything feels tighter and more relaxed at the same time. Grays are more neutral, colors are more vividly themselves. It’s easier on the brain? Kind of like putting fresh tires on a car. Or working in a quieter place. It adds up. Last time I looked at color calibration devices, the info over at the DisplayCAL site seemed to be very good: https://displaycal.net/ https://displaycal.net/

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

This is like that Malcolm Gladwell story about the best spaghetti sauce. There is no one size fits all - different people like different things. https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_and_spaghetti_sauce?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_...

iforgotpassword 4y ago
It's probably about the font just being well designed, having consistent kerning ans whatnot. Same as with design guidelines. Every couple years something new comes along and is better than anything before. We had an intern a few years ago who was still working on his masters and also made some money on the side with "web stuff". He wouldn't stop talking about material design, how it is the best ever and how every margin and padding is scientifically proven to be perfect to the pixel, the blue they picked is perfection, how rounded corners and 3D effects on buttons are fatiguing to the eye, and so on and so on. I guess it was the first time this fellow consciously witnessed the release of a web design framework. It was near impossible to convince him that using bootstrap is just as good, and while certain rules for ratios between paddings, margins and font sizes exist it's much more important your theme is consistent, and that you apply it consistently.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  This is pretty much what happens to anyone who enthusiastically enters a new field. You can tell when someone both cares about typography and is lacking in experience when they start talking about how Comic Sans is the worst font ever made or Helvetica is the best font ever made. They're both excellent fonts when used as intended.
redmen 4y ago
I find it amazing that people ever think that there might be a one-size-fits-all solution to a subjective human experience. Spaghetti Sauce, Fonts. Sure no one likes dog crap in their sauce, so there are obvious experiences no one likes, but to assume that there is one single one that everyone likes? Sometimes we get so nearsighted that by reframing the question it seems obvious.

nerdponx 4y ago

I wish this article included some discussion of serifs on "I" and generally of distinguishing "I" and "l". It's a shame that Clear Sans and Verdana were not included, because they do have a serif "I".

jdrc 4y ago

the answer is verdana, but they didnt test it. I dont think this study is well done. Fonts are learned over time, and people's performance will improve, but differently. There's definitely certain fonts that are optimal.

Daneel_ 4y ago
I agree. I couldn’t help wondering while reading the article if older users are faster with serifed fonts and younger users are faster with sans-serif fonts, however they never touched on it.
- gen3 4y ago
  > A second interesting age-related finding from the new study is that different fonts performed differently for young and old readers. The authors set their dividing line between young and old at 35 years, which is a lower number than I usually employ, but possibly quite realistic given the age-related performance deterioration they measured. > 3 fonts were actually better for older users than for younger users: Garamond, Montserrat, and Poynter Gothic. The remaining 13 fonts were better for younger users than for older users, which is to be expected, given that younger users generally performed better in the study. They kinda did touch on it. From what I can see, letter sizing and kerning looks to make more of a difference.
aggie 4y ago
Is there a better study you can point to? From what I remember looking into this topic the research has always provided ambiguous results with lots of context-dependence.
layer8 4y ago
Seconding Verdana, especially on low-DPI screens.
vikingerik 4y ago
I think the answer was Verdana years ago but not so much today with higher dpi screens. Verdana was designed for CRTs around 800x600, with wide letter forms and kerning, to get ample spacing between glyph elements. It's the champion of readability in that format, but on a modern 1920+ display with subpixel rendering rather than an aperture grill, Verdana feels too big and clunky.

ZYinMD 4y ago

If you do CSS you'd know the best fonts for 16px isn't the best fonts for 18px, and definitely not the best fonts for H1 H2 etc. The Verdana font that HN and reddit uses are pretty good for reading in small text.

skilled 4y ago

Isn't Georgia a very popular font? Interesting to see it isn't mentioned anywhere. It's the preferred font choice for me, but I know a lot of editorials also use it (or a variation of it).

ghaff 4y ago
The font choices are a little odd. There are a number I'm not familiar with or have maybe heard of in passing. But probably Georgia and Verdana in particular seem to be missing. The delta between Helvetica and Arial also seems a little strange. Yes, there are a few type-nerd differences but AFAIK (feel free to correct) they're basically the same font.
- SamBam 4y ago
  > The delta between Helvetica and Arial also seems a little strange. That, along with the basically random ordering of the fonts in the final results (i.e. there is absolutely no metric you could order them by to even roughly match the order produced) is what triggers my BS alarm about this whole thing.

timonoko 4y ago

1. xkcd-script.ttf 2. Opera Lyrics Smooth 3. Crete Round All others should be banned. Especially creepy spidery fonts on some ebooks.

laristine 4y ago

I like that the article about best reading font research itself has Arial as its font.

zwieback 4y ago

Never really thought about it before reading this article but I think I prefer different fonts for different content: strong preference for clean sans-serif mono fonts for coding, something like Arial for general purpose content and something old fashioned with serifs for literature/artsy content.

Sunspark 4y ago

The answer to this question depends on the resolution of the display, the weight of the font, and a person's idiosyncrasies--e.g. nearsightedness. I use a different font for online reading, coding and reading ebook on high-resolution phone display. All 3 are different, and are different sizes and weights.. the purpose is different. You know what really helps? Don't have white as a background. I die now without the Dark Reader browser extension.

simion314 4y ago
>Don't have white as a background. I would say that more important is to check your cool design in a normal screen and not on your super expensive designer monitor. Too often I see light gray text on light background, probably is only readable on the designer screen.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
layer8 4y ago
> Don't have white as a background. That reduces contrast, which makes text harder to read for me. Today’s prevalent IPS displays have a rather low contrast ratio (typically only 1:1000). Please don’t lower it further by styling text as dark gray on light gray. If black on white looks too bright, you probably have set your screen brightness too high.
chrismorgan 4y ago
It is indeed curious that you say “it depends” and then immediately make a strong, exceedingly opinionated recommendation. White (whether #fff or something close) is a very good background for most people on most devices. And as a sweeping generalisation, dark-on-light works better than light-on-dark.

zwieback 4y ago

Good place to ask this: what about the "standard" academic paper font(s) from the LaTeX tradition. I hate it but it gives an immediate gravitas to anything.

tristor 4y ago

The default font on a Kindle, Bookerly, is pretty great, honestly. Of the ones in the article, I think Lato suits me best.

brimble 4y ago

One of the worst things to happen to web usability was the shift away from the user deciding how pages look. In an ideal world the Web ecosystem would have grown up such that nearly all pages respect user configured font and color choices. Then, it wouldn't much matter which font the page creator decided was best, since the user's browser would automatically override it.

pitaj 4y ago
This died mostly because the defaults were so terrible.
- new_stranger 4y ago
  This died because convention > configuration Most users do not want to configure fonts or anything really to use the web.
  - brimble 4y ago
    This could have ended up as a few simplified settings, as presented to most users... as we have with light and dark modes. Colorblind themes (for multiple kinds of colorblindness, say), high-readability themes for people who need the large-print editions of books, that kind of thing. Doesn't have to mean making everyone pick exact point values for every type of H tag, or whatever. A few presets in a dropdown could be really helpful—again, just look how everyone goes nuts over something as simple as having a "dark mode" setting.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    I think it is deeper than personal want. i have a feeling that the more people communicate to each other about something, the more they value their personal experience to be relatable. Every customization makes your experience less relatable.
    - abraxas 4y ago
      Wow, I never thought about that in this category. Thanks for this insight.

rbanffy 4y ago

I really like the readability of avionics screens and their recommendations. I like their simple, mostly monospaced fonts and the uncluttered display panes. I'd love if more monitoring applications used that. edit: https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/ac_25-11b.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/... has some interesting guidelines.

copperx 4y ago
The lack of antialiasing in many avionics systems is highly detrimental for reading, in my opinion. The use of monospace makes numeric differences more salient, which I assume is a safety advantage. In any case, nobody is reading many words off avionics.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  No. They are more related to the "glanceable" displays mentioned in the article.
orlp 4y ago
You'll like https://b612-font.com https://b612-font.com then.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I actually dislike this font - it reminds me of Microsoft console fonts. I love its name, however.

layer8 4y ago

The article doesn’t address font rendering engines, screen DPI and panel type, and font size, which are important factors for which fonts work better than others. But they are right in the conclusion that user customization is needed.

cromniomancer 4y ago

gnicholas 4y ago

Very interesting takeaways regarding different results among old and young: > The takeaway is that, if your designers are younger than 35 years but many of your users are older than 35, then you can’t expect that the fonts that are the best for the designers will also be best for the users. > the differences in reading speed between the different fonts weren’t very big for the young users. Sure, some fonts were better, but they weren’t much better. On the other hand, there were dramatic differences between the fastest font for older users (Garamond) and their slowest font (Open Sans). In other words, picking the wrong font penalizes older users more than young ones.

ChristianGeek 4y ago
There was also the suggestion near the end to cut the number of words for older readers, which is just ridiculous.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I work in the world of dyslexia and assistive technology. I find it unfortunate that people (including folks who work on WCAG) emphasize using simple words and short sentences as the primary ways to accommodate dyslexic readers. These strategies are helpful in making text easier to understand, but they also undermine the nuance of communication. Before doing this, designers should think about how text is laid out so that it can be made maximally accessible in its original form.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > I find it unfortunate that people (including folks who work on WCAG) emphasize using simple words and short sentences as the primary ways to accommodate dyslexic readers. These strategies are helpful in making text easier to understand, but they also undermine the nuance of communication. I think that's a great point. Simplifying meaning for dyslexic and older readers seems condescending and just awful, depriving them of access to the world and degrading them. However, rather than simplify meaning, we can simplify its representation, the text: Better writing produces simpler text and that takes effort. Mark Twain (might have) said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." George Orwell's rules echo many experts: [1] * Never use a Metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never use a long word where a short one will do * If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out * Never use the Passive where you can use the active. * Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a Jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. * Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous Again, thought and effort are required. I've always thought it good writing but hadn't considered accessibility. Write better, more succinctly, and help readers in more ways than one - and yourself too. [1] Politics and the English Language (1946) [though I didn't see the original quote] Better writing - which requires more labor -

ad8e 4y ago

Big warning: their summary is "Among high-legibility fonts, a study found 35% difference in reading speeds between the best and the worst." This is completely wrong and comes from an abuse of statistics. See the original research at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e6428 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e6428 An understandable explanation: imagine having 5 dice. You roll each die 4 times, then compare the highest sum to the lowest sum. Then you report that the highest die rolls 35% higher than the lowest. This is what the authors did, with each die being a font. But the experiment does not actually show evidence of any difference. If you rolled 500 dice, this method could claim that the highest dice are 200% higher than the lowest, even though all dice are still equal. The original authors seem aware of this shortcoming, but did it anyway: "we are somewhat stretching the applicability of a Cohen’s d analysis for this data". This is likely because they did not know of a better method. But it is wrong to be pushing this analysis. The main author is from industry, so perhaps he was unaware that this effect can be corrected for, or that this type of misleading claim is malpractice. But someone in the chain of publishing - the journal editors, the reviewers, the large author list, or Jakob Nielsen who is promoting this - should have caught this. It is their main result! In the absence of legitimate statistics, the article's circumstances point to a failure to detect measurable differences between fonts. There are two ways fonts may be better than each other: 1. across the population, so that one font is better for everyone 2. personalized, so that different fonts are better for different people The first case should be easily detectable, and the second case should see some correlation between preference and speed because of a familiarity bias (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e7351 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222#d1e7351). These are the Bayesian expectations I walked in with. Neither of these appear supported by the article, although I have only skimmed it. To be clear, the experiment does not give evidence that fonts perform equally either. It looks more likely that the experiment design failed.

wolverine876 4y ago
Reading the article, what valuable things can we learn? Imperfection exists in everything in the universe - even the ideas in our minds we sometimes imagine to be ideal and perfect, but they turn imperfect as soon as we write them down (this cursed keyboard!). Imperfection does not destroy all value, or we live caves and aren't communicating using an imperfect alphabet and language, over imperfect signals, using imperfect power, etc etc. (in fact, we would be dead in the caves). Reading and learning from imperfection is the defintion of 'reading and learning', because there's nothing else to read. If I listened to HN comments, very little research would have value, very little information would be worth reading. The top comment is almost always of this nature; it's depressing to me that it still happens; we all should be very familiar by now with social media and these patterns, yet we keep following them. > I have only skimmed it [the OP]. Maybe that should be at the top of the comment. Imagine an OP which presented a detailed analysis and then, at the bottom, said 'I only skimmed the thing I analyzed' - imagine what the top comment would say.

dandongus 4y ago

Personally speaking, I think it's kind of silly that this article neither mentioned screen resolution nor the font rendering differences inherent to various operating systems.

leobg 4y ago

Much more important than the font, to me, is font size and line width. Plus, for anything of article length, ability to take and export highlights. That’s why I import all longer form text into Voice Dream Reader. Browser just isn’t the place for reading imo.

illwrks 4y ago
100%. Line length, line-height and text-size in relation to my distance to the screen are key to comfortable reading.

munk-a 4y ago

Their study excluded Courier New, how rude! But I love reading text with an absolute lack of kerning & multi-character sigils. (I mean this non-sarcastically just to be clear) I've always found that reading wide text comes at very little legibility cost, personally, so I try and consume data in mono-space whenever possible.

antiterra 4y ago

> People read 11% slower for every 20 years they age. How can this be anywhere near a useful or accurate statistic? Surely the rates depend on the age, and there’s likely space for significant improvement in someone’s 20s. I can read in the neighborhood of 750wpm with good comprehension while verbalizing. I’m pretty sure I never was able to read at 900wpm no matter how many years you go back. I don’t think there’s been any meaningful drop at all in the past 20 years. Further, in the next 20 years I wouldn’t be surprised if my reading speed took a huge hit, say 30%-50% (or more.) Even if that averaged out to 10% per year, it would be a misleading statistic. That’s also ignoring comprehension and reading level. At 30, I could focus throughout tearing through a Homeric epic and retain a huge amount about the text, including themes, symbolism, metaphors of note, etc. I couldn’t do anything like that at 20, even if my raw reading speed was faster.

bluenose69 4y ago

I'm not sure the fonts are the sole consideration, anyway. Let's talk about diagrams. The original article (https://doi.org/10.1145/3502222 https://doi.org/10.1145/3502222) uses the click-a-thumbnail scheme for figures. I'm sure this is the decision of the journal, but it is really quite annoying, since you lose context. The actual figures are in the authors' control, however, and they are not very clear. Take Figure 2, for a start, which combines an overly small font and low-contrast colours, reducing legibility for no good reason that I can discern. The PDF is a lot easier to read, as is common with online journals. I'm not sure how many people will bother trying to read such a long document online, as it is formatted. But sometimes I think the point of such studies is simply to get cited, and this is an ideal paper from that point of view: the title states something that is likely obvious to most people, so this might get cited by quite a few people who don't bother to read the details.

tasuki 4y ago

I find it hard to believe that Open Sans has the worst readability of all the tested fonts. I'm pretty sure the humanist Open Sans is faster to read than the geometric Avant Garde. With Garamond winning, what about Palatino and other old-style typefaces? There's a million generic sans-serifs in the study and not a single Didone? Mind, I wouldn't bet on it, but it'd be a more interesting comparison...

mark-r 4y ago
I was surprised by that too, along with the low standing of Avenir. Those are the most beautiful sans serifs. P.S. I don't think screen resolution is high enough yet to do justice to a Didone.

a-dub 4y ago

> The test stimuli were at an approximate 8th grade reading level, which matches our recommendation for web content targeted at a broad consumer audience. that's depressing to read. but i suppose different people have different strengths.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>that's depressing to read congratulations! Depressing reading is second year of college level!
- a-dub 4y ago
  that's an even more depressing thought.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    tsk, nobody appreciates Sylvia Plath anymore.

magios 4y ago

as usual, it is up to personal preference, but I've used Unifont, specifically Unifont CSUR, a bitmap font, tho in ttf form, as my sole font across the system, terminal, vim and web browser (firefox) which allows me to enforce a singular font in webpages by disabling font downloads, rotation and scaling. for me, it appears that having text align to a grid and not have any annoying ligatures or oversized characters makes it more readable.

Epiphany21 4y ago

The characters we use to interact with our computers were mostly designed to be hand-written and minimize the amount of movement your hand has to make going from one letter to the next. I theorize that they don't translate all that well to existing display technologies. Not so much because of the shape of the fonts, but because format isn't conducive to sharing or receiving information as quickly as our machines and our wetware could allow. If you think about this a little more, programming is actually a way to overcome the limitations of spoken/written languages to an extent, since the machine can parse the text faster than you, and it can read other forms of data that are even more efficient. In my view a monitor displaying human-readable text is similar to a legacy ABI that's kept around because of the technical momentum and mindshare it has, not because it's particularly good.

Psyladine 4y ago
>since the machine can parse the text faster than you You had me up until there; the machine doesn't know jack about text. It knows arrays and sequences of numbers according to the rules we've defined them by, for it. Yuo cna reda tihs raedliy btu teh copmtuer cna't. Your brain is trained by billions of years of evolution for symbolic parsing and pattern pairing, and language is just one flex of that muscle. Where computers thrive is where we've done the hard work to break down the syllabic system that is inherent to our biology into mathematical abstractions that can be computed by addition. Computers are great at solving problems we've already done, and repeating the steps, nothing more. Our machines are beautiful, well designed levers. But they don't move anything, they leverage our movement.
- anonuser123456 4y ago
  >Yuo cna reda tihs raedliy btu teh copmtuer cna't. It would be interesting to see what GPT3 would do with this statement. Edit; just tried it. GPT-3 chatbot understood it instantly.
  - Psyladine 4y ago
    Cutting edge language processing algorithms trained by professionals in a herding manner for years ought to produce something that solves what is basically a parlor trick of language. It might even be a cheat-around on encoded rules but I don't have the paper. Still I'm willing to go out on an increasingly thin limb and say GPT3 is still playing a really big game of mad libs, and its 'understanding' of the language is more akin to the extremely rudimentary mathematical factoring of sentence structure and grammatical rules. That is, it could be trained to recycle on what others have done for poetry, and spit out something that sounds like what we've read that we call poetry, but it isn't putting poetry out, because it doesn't know what that means...not in like a conscientious way, but a literal, it has no "idea" which to express through a medium, it's just transcribing according to rules, not from say, first principles which then are interpreted through rules. Again, too much to demand of a really fast adding machine anyway.

ggm 4y ago

depends what you're reading. fixed-width fonts make some inputs easier, like code, and data. So if the word "read" means solely flow text, I can buy an argument the pretty fonts have value which goes to character recognition, kerning, ligatures and the role of caps and serif. If the word "read" includes "do a rapid scan of a column of data to confidence check it makes sense" or "find the longest number (==longest string) in a list of unsorted numbers" then fixed width will score higher than almost any other quality in my opinion. My reading of the history of fonts suggests some people thought italianate styled writing was a mistake. florid, and hard to read. to my eyes gothic is sometimes impenetrably hard to read.

gerdesj 4y ago

It's almost as though people are individuals. The write up (OP) often reads like an apology but I think that is wrong too. For example, some fonts favour certain eye conditions. So me at 51ish with shortsightedness in both eyes and some pronounced astigmatism in one of them and also general "degradation" will have some different ideas about a decent font than someone with 20/20 vision or my old mum who had rather better than that (plus longsightedness) At the moment, I need a new pair of specs which I have held off from due to the virus but my reading speed is mostly down to text size rather than typeface. Incidentally, a font/fount is an exemplar of a typeface but who's quibbling?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

armchairstats 4y ago

Last author is the same guy who did the "Glanceable Fonts" stuff at MIT https://www.nngroup.com/articles/glanceable-fonts/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/glanceable-fonts/

ncmncm 4y ago

No single answer? Sure there is. It's called Linux Libertine. There you go.

userbinator 4y ago

In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average). Faster because "I hate this font and I want to stop looking at text in it as soon as I can"? I remember reading how all-uppercase letters can make people read faster, but also make them miss misspellings more frequently because it's more annoying to read all-uppercase text.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

This is great supporting evidence in favor of reintroducing user-selectable stylesheets, along with better UI to allow more users to take advantage of the feature. Remember when Opera Browser let you switch to user-style mode with one click or keypress?

ximm 4y ago

I could not find the raw data anywhere. Is it really missing from the original paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502222)? I would have really liked to analyse the data myself, but this way I cannot take this research serious.

chrysostom 4y ago

They tested the same typeface twice. Noto Sans is an extended family of fonts based on Open Sans that covers more languages. The design of their glyphs is exactly the same (being Open Sans). Yet the results place Open Sans last at 254 WPM, and Noto Sans 8th at 272 WPM…

idlewan 4y ago
Doing a visual comparison (tab flipping between https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans and https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans&preview.text=Whereas%20recognition%20of%20the%20inherent%20dignity&preview.text_type=custom https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans?query=open+sans&... , aligning the sample text exactly), I could notice some differences though: - The 'g' character was changed, they are quite different - For the regular (400) weight, Noto Sans is slightly bolder but also more compact But you're definitely right, most character shapes look directly inherited from one to the other. I wonder if the weight & letter spacing change can explain the reading speed differences, or if measurement error / random jitter is actually what explains the different average speed in the study between the two.
spyder 4y ago
Their difference is mentioned in the paper (and they're saying it's the other way around: Open Sans derived from Noto Sans): "Open Sans is a general use font derived from Noto Sans. Typographers designed Noto Sans for the small screens on Android devices. " And they mention Noto Sans having hinting for that: "Also, five fonts have hinting (i.e., are engineered for reading on screens with low resolutions): Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, Noto Sans, and Times."
- chrysostom 4y ago
  > "Open Sans is a general use font derived from Noto Sans. Typographers designed Noto Sans for the small screens on Android devices." Unless I'm missing something, that's not quite right. Open Sans, designed by Steve Matteson, was released in 2011. Noto Sans, commissioned by Google to cover a wide array of languages, was first released in 2013. Similarly there is a Noto Serif, based on Droid Serif. Open Sans itself goes back to Droid Sans, an earlier design by Matteson. Anyhow, whichever way it is, the point is that both typefaces share the same design. But you're right, the typefaces are not exactly the same. Here's a visual comparison: http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Open%20Sans&second=Noto%20Sans&p=1 http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Open%20Sans&seco... As idlewan pointed out above, the lowercase "g" is different, and so is the uppercase "I." There is also a slight weight difference. As you mention, the authors of the paper also note that Noto Sans is hinted, whereas Open Sans presumably is not. So I am wrong in my comment above to call it "the same" typeface. The changes are very subtle though, so it's interesting to see the difference in performance. Also worth noting is that they tested Arial and Helvetica (http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Arial&second=Helvetica&q=Go http://www.identifont.com/differences?first=Arial&second=Hel...), both hinted and almost identical in weight. Helvetica ranked 4th (283 WPM) and Arial 11th (270 WPM).

rcarmo 4y ago

I’ve been using Georgia for ages, since it exists almost everywhere and has distinct serifs that (in my case at least) help distinguish between some letter forms. But I’ve never found a good sans-serif equivalent that looked good on a page with it.

halz 4y ago

The Lexend group was formed out of research on second grade students (US) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777945/] that lead them to a font design [https://design.google/library/lexend-readability/ https://design.google/library/lexend-readability/] that apparently showed improved reading proficiency. A 'world-script' version of the font family is also published as Readex Pro [https://github.com/ThomasJockin/readexpro https://github.com/ThomasJockin/readexpro]