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Originally Posted by jbruce
Depends on the school of the typographer (and, IMHO, the age of the target demographic). Serif is traditionally used, if I'm remembering correctly, because people complained that the pages were too bright in sans-serif (Italian typographer I believe) - because serifs darken the page through optical color mixing.
Some new texts, in an effort to seem more "modern" (many websites, or texts on the digital world) - go with either a very light serif with noticeable variation between thicks and thins (Palatino or Georgia) or sans (Helvetica mainly). While others stick with more of a slab-like serif with more minor variations in thicks and thins (Times) more out of tradition than actual readability concerns (IMO).
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hm, that's an interesting theory, but i've never heard anything like that before. the reason for using serif fonts for body text is that the letter shapes are more distinctive and therefore much more easily recognized by the eye while skimming, creating a more legible text without extra effort from the reader. sans serif text has many letter forms which resemble each other ; you can see this by looking at some text written in sans serif font and masking the bottom half of the letters (there is a visual demonstrating this effect but i can't find it right now).
the reason sans serif has become popular for web use including in body text is actually a question of resolution ; the low resolution of computer screens means that finer details are often imperfectly displayed, and fine serifs (like on Times) can give a sort of twinkling effect as they scroll which is distracting. a
slab serif font displays better because the serifs are chunkier.
the grey of the text depends more on the weight of the stroke, the size of the eyes and the x-height of the font. since both serif and sans serif fonts can have thicker or thinner strokes and varying
x-heights (Fontin, for example, is a serif font with a very high x-height ; Arial Black and
Impact are both sans serif fonts which give a very dense and dark text), it's hard to generalise about that based on the absense or presence of serifs. overall, the blacker the font (smaller eyes, thicker strokes...), the darker the page will seem overall, however i am not sure this will affect perceived
contrast. the wikipedia article about
font gives a good overview for people who are not familiar with the different elements of typography. it is an interesting theory though.
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Basically - what I think will happen - is less optical color mixing between the optical gray of the font, and the dimmed white of the background. The brightness issue mentioned above - shouldn't really play here - because the "paper" isn't bright white; therefore, won't reflect bright light back to the reader, which would ultimately lead to eye fatigue/strain.
In theory even a serif font which has a light gray would suffice. But, as I said, I can't figure out how to take the LRF files I have - and make them display in a different font. Zelda did a wonderful explanation for converting documents - but, the LRFs I have don't let me convert them; so, I can't get it to work.
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optical illusions can be powerful things so it's quite possible that you could influence the perceived contrast using one of these methods. i'd be interested to hear the results of the your experimentation.
as for the use of specific fonts though... while i believe you can embed fonts in lrf files at the cost of page-turning speed, the method i linked to only works for epub files. can you get the source texts for the lrfs you want to use ? if yes, you can reconvert them to epub and use custom fonts in them.