On Sunday 26 June 2011 17:38:12 Trevor Jenkins wrote: > On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:13 PM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com>wrote: > > > I am interested in which font do I use, because usually lyx > > > fonts are somewhat "pale". > > > > On my setup, Century Schoolbook is the least pale font. I use > > Century Schoolbook on all my books, although I'm looking for a > > more screen- readable font for my pure eBooks. > > Some recent work has suggested that "readable" fonts are not that > useful. Try listening to this segment of the BBC's premier morning > news programme, the Today Programme. > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9360000/9360166.stm > > Or there's a printed report on the Telegraph's web site > > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/amazon/8256899/E-readers-too- > easy-to-read.html > > Alternatively you can read comments from a neuroscientist about the > research on the blogs reachable from here > > https://policypress.wordpress.com/tag/jonah-lehrer/ > > Or there's a pre-print of the original paper that started this > series of news reports to be had here > > http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/Diemand-Yauman_Oppenhe > imer_2010.pdf
:-) Statistics are a funny thing. If my readers were all between 18 and 40, paid to read and remember, and need only read for 90 seconds at a time, I'd indeed use a less readable font. But the two studies you quote have little to do with my readers. My readers tend to skew 30-60, so a lot of them have very real visual problems. I'm not going to subject them to skinny little Times Roman or Paladino. My latest book, which I hope to offer for sale around midnight tonight, is 110,000 words. I'm not going to make the visually challenged pull out a software magnifying glass, or horizontal scroll every line for 110,000 words. That's just not the way I roll. Disfluent fonts will simply cause many of my readers to stop in the middle of an otherwise good book. One of the quoted studies showed a 14% increase in retention with disfluent fonts. Fine -- I'll use fluent fonts and write 30% more interestingly. That way people of all visual acuities will benefit. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt
