stevens@hsi.UUCP (Richard Stevens) (01/04/89)
Is anyone aware of any type of statistics used to compare different
fonts ? For example, if I format a document using the Times family
(I use ditroff with Adobe's TranScript, but that shouldn't matter)
and then format it again using the Palatino family, the Palatino
document requires more pages since the font is "bigger". If I look
at the font metrics file, for example, comparing Times, Palatino
and New Century for a few typical characters I get
character Times Palatino New Century
--------- ----- -------- -----------
0 (zero) 100 100 111
A 144 156 144
E 122 122 144
d 100 122 115
From this, the characters in both Palatino and New Century are "wider"
than in the Times family. Visually I find the characters in the
Palatino and New Century fonts bigger also.
I would guess someone could take the character occurrence frequencies
and a font metrics file and come up with a number for each font that
would give you some idea as to the size of the font.
A related question is whether anyone has come up with any statistics
to quantitatively measure the "readability" of different fonts
(as subjective a concept as this might be) ??
Richard Stevens
Health Systems International, New Haven, CT
stevens@hsi.com
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