Legibility

Type is legible if the glyph and word shapes are easily recognised ...


1	legibility; legible	leserlichkeit, die; leserlich
2	glyph	zeichenform, die
3	serif type	serifen schrift, die
4	sans serif	serifenlose schrift, die
5	word contour	wortkontur
6	x-height	minuskel-höhe, x-höhe
7	font weight	fette, die
8	font hight	versalhöhe

legibility-badtypo.png

Examples of bad typography: Too narrow letter spacing, somewhat overlapping characters and to wide word spacing with big holes in adjusted text

legibility-good.png

Type lines with well spaced characters, some are kerned.

legibility-heavystrokes.png

Some lines of text with very thick characters

legibility-lettershapes.png

Lines of characters split into an upper part with the ascenders and a lower part with the descenders. The shapes can be recognised better in the upper part. Also sans-serif shapes are presented

legibility-limited.png

Phantasy shapes of chararacters, such as 3-D wire frames or completely distorted shapes with very variable stroke widths

legibility-restrictions.png

Shapes with very long ascenders and descenders. Other shapes with little distinctions in basic forms (a o etc.)

legibility-serif&sans.png

On the left side some lines with serif font and to the right the same text with sans-serif

legibility-serifs.png

Various forms of the character i: very bold strokes and serifs, tiny i-dots and narrow strokes

legibility-weight.png

Some forms with well weighted characters (Times, Bookman) and below two lines with very bold characters

legibility-wordshapes.png

Upper line is all uppercase. Lower line is mixed case with the bounding box showing the 'melody' of the shape

legibility-xhightexcessive.png

The words horn and norn in a font with very small ascenders. n and h are nearly the same

legibility-xhightlarge.png

Character h i with both standard ascender hight and large ascender hight

Sources

Swiss publication Produktion+Print, Nr. 10, Oktober 1996. Definitions according to Duden / Wahrig / Langenscheidt.

URL:	Created: 2003-03-11	Updated:
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