Letter and symbol misrecognition in highly legible typefaces (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Letter and symbol misrecognition in highly legible typefaces (2015)

typography.guru

33 pointsisralcduke7 comments

If you are a professional in the field of typography, what is the/an authoritative source on (mis)recognition of characters - if that is even the correct term and if I am asking the right question? (Maybe typeface only has a tiny effect, for example.)

It interests me and I pick it up in bits and pieces as I come across it, but that's slow, leaves holes in my understanding, and it's unreliable: I'm never sure of the quality of what I'm reading - is it just some person's opinion? A fringe theory? etc.

Typeface can have huge effects, as fraktur/blackletter show (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Calligraphy.malmesbury...., via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter, is a nice example)

However, even that diminishes with experience.

You have to look for studies that actually tested these theories (formally or informally) and consider their methodologies (just like any other scientific research).

There are a ton of opinions that aren't backed up by fact because type design so often sits on the edge of art and design.

If all else fails, find some people unrelated to what you're working on and ask them some objective questions.

This article seems fairly well sourced. Of course there could be bias in the selection, but checking out the sources might be a good place to start.

I prefer the "infant" lowercase 'a' purely on the basis of aesthetics. The two-story 'a' seems fussy and pedantic. And the loopy 'g' descender that's so fashionable nowadays drives me nuts. In both cases I suppose an argument can be made that the versions I dislike are better for readability, and thus should be preferable as defaults, but I'm glad we almost always get to choose our own typefaces most of the time nowadays.

> In both cases I suppose an argument can be made that the versions I dislike are better for readability

This actually matters for my custom tiny ~5x4 pixel font on 4K screens, but I'm still using the infant lowercase 'a'. Partly because I can't seem to recreate the double-stacked a that I liked, and partly because it's very hard to fit into the 5x4 grid. But the end result is that there's less than a pixel difference between my 'a' and my 'o': A solid pixel instead of an AAed one.

(A 2x screenshot: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MaulingMonkey/TtyRecMonkey... )

Ironic then that this article is set in a hard-to-read typeface!

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