Repeated studies have shown that while pages printed in a fully-justified non-serif font are pretty to look at, ragged-right justification with a serif font is easier to read. Since up until now, the bulk of my writing has been academic, I modified most of my templates in MS Word, AbiWord, and other word processors to use ragged-right justification with Times New Roman, 10-pt font, thus meeting every standard of academic writing.
Now that I’m starting Scrivener, I’ll probably stick to the same format.
I’ve long heard that serif fonts are easier to read (dating back to the 1980s), but I’ve never found any studies to support the claims. I’d really like to see them - can you provide some references?
Here’s a study:
“Do serifs provide an advantage in the recognition of written words?” by Carmen Moret-Tatay and Manuel Perea, published in the Journal Of Cognitive Psychology, 2011, 23 (5), pp 619-624. http://www.uv.es/~mperea/serif_JCP.pdf
I used to supervise and assess MA dissertations on translation, which included a translation of a 5000 word text accompanied by a 5000 word commentary on the texts, the translation process etc.
One year nearly 20 years ago, there were two students from the same European country who were friends, always in each other’s company and working together. I had taught them, but didn’t supervise their dissertations. When I received their dissertations to assess, they were identically structured with each section and subsection of roughly the same length, but since they had translated different texts, the content was different.
However, I had these two commentaries to read and assess. At the time, there were no guidelines as to font to use etc. and of the two, one was in TNR, the other was in Arial or similar sans-serif font. I found the one in the sans-serif font took me half as long again to read as the one in TNR; I found it much more difficult to concentrate on. I had to take extra trouble to make sure I didn’t mark that student down in relation to the other as it was the content that was to be assessed, not the presentation. Because of the extra effort I had to put in to reading it, my natural inclination would have led me to assume that the commentary was more pedestrian. It wasn’t.
So my personal experience has always been that sans-serif fonts on paper are more effortful to read than serif fonts … with standard fonts that is.
I made no comment to colleagues who gave their students handouts printed in 24 point Arial or Helvetica (depending on platform!).
I find a similar slow-down — perhaps it’s discomfort — reading san serif faces, particularly if it’s a long passage. But I wonder if that has anything to do with how we first began to read, and/or how we have read ever since. Memory back that far cannot be relied on, perhaps, but it seems that I never was much aware of san serif fonts at least until I was out of high school. I appreciate them now for things like table heads and footnotes, where my old eyes need help sorting different types of material on the page. But for go-ahead straight through reading, those serifs seem downright essential.
Thanks for turning me on to Merriweather, Pigfender. I was recently editing a document in Google Docs, which offers it and some other attractive fonts as options, remembered your recommendation, and converted the doc to Merriweather-- and it made me Merri indeed! I second your recommendation and will now try to track it down for my Mac system.
Thanks also to troyscrivenerforum for encouraging me to download Courier Prime, which I did and have made my Scrivener body text font.
Thanks for the study. However, I don’t see how you reached that conclusion from their research. In fact, it seems quite contrary to the final statement of Moret-Tatay and Perea (2011, p.624),
The infographic also seems to run counter to the published research article.
Having said that, the article itself only measured reaction time for individual words. This would seem to be consistent with the historical (at least in my experience) demarcation between serif and sans-serif typefaces. My memory of the typeface “rules” is that serif was considered best for blocks of text (i.e. paragraphs) and sans-serif was considered best for headings and highlights. This would also be, more or less, consistent with the infographic.
I love the article, and am very grateful you posted it! But even if their findings are replicated, it still leaves open the question whether ease of recognising words presented individually carries over to ease of semantic interpretation of slabs of text. It may yet be that the 1980s claims were right (sans-serif typeface for headers, serif for paragraphs).
When writing, though, in the rare instance Palatino isn’t available, I’ll go with what’s available. Legibility is all that matters to me in the creation phase.
Considering publication stage (which it haven’t reached yet), I’ll prefer to work with a professional book designer in selecting a font set.
Palatino. Courier Prime. And for publication: consult a pro designer.
For titles and headings a sans serif font like Albertus, Friz-Quadrata or Alberta extra light. These are actually flared fonts and not strictly san serif.
For body text I currently use Baskerville, Palatino and Latin Modern Roman.
Regarding serif vs sans serif debate for online use. This series of comments on an Adobe forum covers both sides but the conclusions is that now with higher resolution screens the choice is up to the author.
“Almost all mainstream printed newspapers, magazines, and books use serif type, and thus people are more accustomed to reading long texts in this style. However, given the research data, the difference in reading speed between serif and sans serif is apparently quite small. Thus, there’s no strong usability guideline in favor of using one or the other, so you can make the choice based on other considerations — such as branding or the mood communicated by a particular typographical style.”
Libertine (of Wikipedia fame) was linked to above, but if you like those kinds of flared hybrid fonts you might like Biolinium, also from the Libertine project, or Optima, free with every Mac. They are low-key and very clean, but have that subtle quasi-serif feel to them. I like these kinds of fonts in my index cards and outliner in Scrivener.
The flared hybrid fonts are clean and classy. They are different enough that they can be used in titles and headings to contrast with a serif body font. There is something about the aesthetics of sans-serif that I find disagreeable. de gustibus non est disputandum
