[scribus] font usage

[Gregory Pittman]

On 08/16/2009 03:36 AM, Helge Hielscher wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:51:41 -0400, John Culleton wrote:
>    
>> The book "Type&  Layout" by Colin Wheidon&  Geoffrey Heard comse down on
>> the side of serif fonts for all uses in terms of comprehension.
>>      
>
> How did they measure it? Are there studies with sustainable results?
>
> There are counterexamples, e.g. "Legibility and Readability of Small
> Print" comes to the conclusion: "Contrary to the Hypotheses regarding the
> superiority of sans serif fonts, the presence or absence of serifs did not
> distinguish the better fonts from the worse ones."
> http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/gkconnol/Discussion.html
> or
> "Performance differences between Times and Helvetica in a reading task"
> summarises "Romans and sans serifs were found to be equally legible"
> http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volume6/issue3/rudi.pdf
>    
As others have said, this is an interesting discussion. It may seem 
paradoxical, but I think the intensity of opinion and discussion is an 
index of how important this issue of font choice is. I'd like to 
encourage anyone interested to submit some of their knowledge and 
experience to our wiki in the Design category:

http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Category:DESIGN

I'd like to see if I can gather together some snippets from the list 
discussion, since I think there were some points well taken here.

It's also important to acknowledge that legibility/readability is the 
not the only influence on font choice. Looking within various font 
families, one can easily see that fonts have their own body language 
that communicates something an author or designer may also want to 
impart to some layout. This also is apparent in knowing that at least 
some who contribute to the list and do layout may have thousands of 
fonts, and are constantly searching for more. How many serif or sans 
serif fonts does one need? There doesn't seem to be a finite answer to that.

Greg