My opinion: People don't read individual glyphs, they read words. The amount of variety between different glyphs and other factors such as kerning which help th

My opinion: People don't read individual glyphs, they read words. The amount of variety between different glyphs and other factors such as kerning which help the letters combine to make an elegant whole word. A classic example of how not to do this is blackletter; all the glyphs are so similar that at a glance, the text looks like variable length blocks of repeated characters. It is also very hard to read. In my experience, many computer fonts also fall into this trap. By trying to establish a consistent theme or feel to the glyphs, they iron out all the letters' individual quirks that make them easy to distinguish and recognise, thus readability suffers. I think in terms of readability, the sans/serif issue is largely irrelevant (as the article might suggest).