Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The only scientific result is that more people prefer reading with sans-serif.
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Only certain groups and types of content. There is no proof that sans or serif is better or worse in general.
But again with paper you have no choice. With ebooks there is a choice. It's possible to "over-ride" web pages, but not worth the bother.
What is truly an issue is paler grey text on white or darker grey on black, but even grey is a terrible choice. Too many UI and websites are now driven by the designer's concept of pretty rather than real research.
Just recently:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/...td=keepreading
An aside:
Underlining was invented for typewriters. A typesetter would then change it to bold or italic. Later *Some Text* and /Some Text/ were used to indicate bold and italic as it's less typing. So Underline was chosen for hyper Links as by 1989 it wasn't needed as almost all things supported Bold and many thing Italics.
Some people find large blocks of bold or italic more tiring to read which is why bold is mostly now for headings. The italics can mean many different things: Emphasis of various kinds, a title in body text rather than quotes, a foreign language (common before 1960s), thoughts, telepathy, a short in-line quotation etc.
In many Western languages we find ALL CAPS tiring to read now because we are used to the 4th to 8th C. innovation of lower case mixed with capitals (rules for capitalisation vary with language and context). Many languages don't have cases, bold, italic or even native quotation marks. So this gives an insight to the Ragged vs fully justified and sans vs serif arguments; we are most comfortable with the formatting and typological conventions we are most familiar with. That's not just an opinion because many studies agree. It's indeed the difficulty in studies of agged vs fully justified and sans vs serif or even columns, column width and full page width. Obviously broadsheet newspapers need columns, but what is ideal width?