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Yes but they greatly enhance readability and are carriers of information. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because you can doesn't mean you sh

Yes but they greatly enhance readability and are carriers of information. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are so many cliches that apply here.

jraph 3y ago
I'm surprised by the strength of your comment. The article doesn't argue for lowercasing everything, and cites several cases (ah!) where it shouldn't hurt. Including case insensitive languages where case doesn't carry any information by definition and where it's already common practice and uncontroversial to lowercase everything, and English title case. With this in mind, my next question is: > they greatly enhance readability Do you have any evidence for this? My native language is not English and we use the Latin alphabet. The case for titles is the same as for regular sentences. We are doing fine. I would even say that the English title case feels somewhat odd and confusing. Titles are also virtually always set apart / rendered differently as normal text so I fail to see how normal case for titles loses information and how title case helps in any way. Actually, I even believe that title case sometimes loses information. Capital letters mark (Mark, btw :-)) proper names, this marking is lost with title case and this may sometimes bring ambiguity.
- toast0 3y ago
  > Do you have any evidence for this? US street and highway signage went from all caps to mixed case in the past 30 years. I believe the US Department of Transportation did studies and found mixed case was easier to read. Although they use a non-standard font.
  - olah_1 3y ago
    this is because we recognize most words by shape. capital case is all single-height while lowercase is mixed height (it has letters that ascend and descend). for situations like road signs, being able to scan and see the “shape” of a word quickly is very helpful. so that is an argument in favor of using lowercase.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      This is just a myth.
      - redundantly 3y ago
        While the word shape meme is a myth [1] there are some half truths to it. It is known that mixed casing does disrupt reading [2], which gives some weight to the idea that the shapes of words and letters does affect reading. For myself I know that my reading speed and comprehension suffers when reading title cased sentences. This leads me to always "fix" [3] documents I update or otherwise contribute to at work when others do it for headings, subheadings, headers and footers. [1] https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/ [3] I say "fix" because I know it's a generally acceptable formatting method when writing, I just don't like it.
        lupire 3y ago
        Link 1 is wrong
        redundantly 3y ago
        Thank you for pointing that out! Correct link: https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/
        olah_1 3y ago
        > In this paper, Pelli and colleagues show that when reading words that have been distorted by presenting each letter in visual noise (like an out of tune television), readers do not perform as well as an 'ideal observer' who can recognise words based on their shape alone I said being able to see the word shape is very helpful. I did not say that you can read based on the word shape alone.
  - jraph 3y ago
    Interesting, though one could as well conclude from this that all caps is not very readable. We need to know the actual motivation behind this change, not a supposition. My question would be from title case to normal case for titles. We already know that normal case is readable, that's what we use for normal text. We also know (?) that people speaking another language with a Latin alphabet don't have trouble reading titles.
    - chrisan 3y ago
      Heyo, just curious what language(s) use the latin alphabet without case?
      - jraph 3y ago
        We have case, but we don't have title case. We write titles using normal case, with an upper case letter at the start and for proper names but no other words. (French, but I think that's also true for Spanish, Italian and many other languages. I don't know if German have a specific case for titles like English but they have an upper case letter for common nouns).
        teo_zero 3y ago
        Correct. Sentence case in Spanish: "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha" and Italian: "Il nome della rosa". Sentence case also in German, with the usual rule that all nouns are capitalized: "Kritik der reinen Vernunft". Same for Russian (non-latin of course): "Война и мир". I suspect English is the only language to use special, though not standardized, rules for titles.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Yes but they greatly enhance readability No they don't. It is true that modern readers read lowercase text more quickly than they read capitalized text. And it's also true that, after a small amount of practice reading capitalized text, the difference in reading speed becomes zero. There is no benefit of any kind to the lowercase letters.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I agree, but it has me wondering about a semantic-based compression approach. If we know a period is often followed by a space and a capital, can we compressed based on “which periods to reapply this rule to”?
a2800276 3y ago
The whole premise of the article is infuriating. The author claims using only lowercase _enhances_ legibility, maybe for them, but this is subjective at best, and incorrect for the general population of literate adults. Also lowercase compresses just as well as USING ONLY UPPER CASE would. You would get better compression result yet, f y lft t ll th vwls frm yr sntncs.
- mrmanner 3y ago
  But the premise isn’t that using only lowercase increases legibility. The Premise is that Not Using Title Case Improves Compression and Also Increases Legibility for Author of Article.
alpaca128 3y ago
At least in titles I think "falsifying" the case of random words actually hurts readability. It can get confusing sometimes, especially when it includes a person's name that also happens to be a noun.
makeitdouble 3y ago
Readability is a complex matter in that it depends a lot on the reader, their expectations, and how well they handle some cases vs others. On title case in particular, I wonder how you would feel if it was applied to everything in the text, and not just the title. Would it be more readable ? For me personally it absolutely wouldn't and I'd be infuriated after three lines. Then if most people were on the opposite side, I'd think we'd have at least a few prominent use cases where all the text would be in title case, and I can't think of any. Is title case's point to just make it clear it's a title ? If so, we have so many better ways to convey that (bold, underlining, spacing, positionning, bullets and markers etc.). On the baby and the bath water saying, the more I think of it the more I see Title case as just a relic of some old practice I'm not sure why we cling to in this day and age...what's the baby, what am I missing ?
jacknews 3y ago
i don't agree that capital letters greatly enhance readability if they do at all, the benefit is not worth having an entire second alphabet to learn, and deal with, imho (i.m.h.o. i-m-h-o, etc) there are many other, and better, ways to improve readability

jraph 3y ago

I'm surprised by the strength of your comment. The article doesn't argue for lowercasing everything, and cites several cases (ah!) where it shouldn't hurt. Including case insensitive languages where case doesn't carry any information by definition and where it's already common practice and uncontroversial to lowercase everything, and English title case. With this in mind, my next question is: > they greatly enhance readability Do you have any evidence for this? My native language is not English and we use the Latin alphabet. The case for titles is the same as for regular sentences. We are doing fine. I would even say that the English title case feels somewhat odd and confusing. Titles are also virtually always set apart / rendered differently as normal text so I fail to see how normal case for titles loses information and how title case helps in any way. Actually, I even believe that title case sometimes loses information. Capital letters mark (Mark, btw :-)) proper names, this marking is lost with title case and this may sometimes bring ambiguity.

toast0 3y ago
> Do you have any evidence for this? US street and highway signage went from all caps to mixed case in the past 30 years. I believe the US Department of Transportation did studies and found mixed case was easier to read. Although they use a non-standard font.
- olah_1 3y ago
  this is because we recognize most words by shape. capital case is all single-height while lowercase is mixed height (it has letters that ascend and descend). for situations like road signs, being able to scan and see the “shape” of a word quickly is very helpful. so that is an argument in favor of using lowercase.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    This is just a myth.
    - redundantly 3y ago
      While the word shape meme is a myth [1] there are some half truths to it. It is known that mixed casing does disrupt reading [2], which gives some weight to the idea that the shapes of words and letters does affect reading. For myself I know that my reading speed and comprehension suffers when reading title cased sentences. This leads me to always "fix" [3] documents I update or otherwise contribute to at work when others do it for headings, subheadings, headers and footers. [1] https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/ [3] I say "fix" because I know it's a generally acceptable formatting method when writing, I just don't like it.
      - lupire 3y ago
        Link 1 is wrong
        redundantly 3y ago
        Thank you for pointing that out! Correct link: https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/
        olah_1 3y ago
        > In this paper, Pelli and colleagues show that when reading words that have been distorted by presenting each letter in visual noise (like an out of tune television), readers do not perform as well as an 'ideal observer' who can recognise words based on their shape alone I said being able to see the word shape is very helpful. I did not say that you can read based on the word shape alone.
- jraph 3y ago
  Interesting, though one could as well conclude from this that all caps is not very readable. We need to know the actual motivation behind this change, not a supposition. My question would be from title case to normal case for titles. We already know that normal case is readable, that's what we use for normal text. We also know (?) that people speaking another language with a Latin alphabet don't have trouble reading titles.
  - chrisan 3y ago
    Heyo, just curious what language(s) use the latin alphabet without case?
    - jraph 3y ago
      We have case, but we don't have title case. We write titles using normal case, with an upper case letter at the start and for proper names but no other words. (French, but I think that's also true for Spanish, Italian and many other languages. I don't know if German have a specific case for titles like English but they have an upper case letter for common nouns).
      - teo_zero 3y ago
        Correct. Sentence case in Spanish: "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha" and Italian: "Il nome della rosa". Sentence case also in German, with the usual rule that all nouns are capitalized: "Kritik der reinen Vernunft". Same for Russian (non-latin of course): "Война и мир". I suspect English is the only language to use special, though not standardized, rules for titles.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Yes but they greatly enhance readability No they don't. It is true that modern readers read lowercase text more quickly than they read capitalized text. And it's also true that, after a small amount of practice reading capitalized text, the difference in reading speed becomes zero. There is no benefit of any kind to the lowercase letters.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I agree, but it has me wondering about a semantic-based compression approach. If we know a period is often followed by a space and a capital, can we compressed based on “which periods to reapply this rule to”?

a2800276 3y ago

The whole premise of the article is infuriating. The author claims using only lowercase _enhances_ legibility, maybe for them, but this is subjective at best, and incorrect for the general population of literate adults. Also lowercase compresses just as well as USING ONLY UPPER CASE would. You would get better compression result yet, f y lft t ll th vwls frm yr sntncs.

mrmanner 3y ago
But the premise isn’t that using only lowercase increases legibility. The Premise is that Not Using Title Case Improves Compression and Also Increases Legibility for Author of Article.

alpaca128 3y ago

At least in titles I think "falsifying" the case of random words actually hurts readability. It can get confusing sometimes, especially when it includes a person's name that also happens to be a noun.

makeitdouble 3y ago

Readability is a complex matter in that it depends a lot on the reader, their expectations, and how well they handle some cases vs others. On title case in particular, I wonder how you would feel if it was applied to everything in the text, and not just the title. Would it be more readable ? For me personally it absolutely wouldn't and I'd be infuriated after three lines. Then if most people were on the opposite side, I'd think we'd have at least a few prominent use cases where all the text would be in title case, and I can't think of any. Is title case's point to just make it clear it's a title ? If so, we have so many better ways to convey that (bold, underlining, spacing, positionning, bullets and markers etc.). On the baby and the bath water saying, the more I think of it the more I see Title case as just a relic of some old practice I'm not sure why we cling to in this day and age...what's the baby, what am I missing ?

jacknews 3y ago

i don't agree that capital letters greatly enhance readability if they do at all, the benefit is not worth having an entire second alphabet to learn, and deal with, imho (i.m.h.o. i-m-h-o, etc) there are many other, and better, ways to improve readability