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Originally Posted by Skinjob
I've also compared "Bookerly" to Georgia, and superficially, most would have a hard time telling the two apart. At least, in a single line of text. Just a very slightly different curvature to some of the letters, that's not the least bit apparent. The most obvious difference, is in the spacing.
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To me the most obvious difference is the variation in the thickness of the strokes. Bookerly has less variation while Georgia has more. When a font has less variation it's called a low contrast font (or typeface?), and for me, a low contrast font works better on e-ink. Adding extra weight to a font can affect that stroke variation and make it feel like it's lower contrast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi...pecimenAIB.svg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ace_sample.svg
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"Bookerly" changes the layout quite a lot, enough to put paragraphs on different pages. Because even though both fonts were set at the exact same size, Bookerly produces 14 line pages (at this size), Georgia does 15 line pages. Yet both appear to be the same size font! I still had a hard time choosing, but what gave Georgia the edge over Bookerly, is that it had a better 'feel', during reading.
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The weird/frustrating thing about fonts is that font sizes can only be compared within the font. In other words you can say that 9 point Georgia is smaller than 10 point Georgia but you
cannot say anything about the size relationship between 9 point Georgia and 9 point Bookerly without measuring how many pixels high and wide each one is.
Way back in the early days of laser printers the Apple Laserwriter had a few built in fonts, and its Times Roman was often used for the body text. If you wanted to use a monospaced typewriter font to simulate programming code or whatever, then you'd use its Courier. But 9 point Courier was huge compared to 9 point Times Roman so you had to fudge it and use a smaller sized Courier.