Re: IDENTIFIERS in Upper Case

[William Clodius <wclodius@lanl.gov>]

Robert A Duff wrote:
> <snip>
> Anybody have any references about readability of different sorts of
> fonts?  Colors?
> <snip>

This is VERY application specific. Most contexts probably benefit from a
proportional serif font. (Note however, the most commonly available such
font, Times Roman is intended for newspaper work where density is
important, its letters tend to be more narrow with less spacing than
ideal for most applications.) However, I suspect most readers of this
group are not interested in most applications, but are rather interested
in the display of text on monitors for a few selected applications,
e.g., email, and editing code. Serif looses its advantages as resolution
decreases, so sans-serif tends to be preferred for display on monitors,
however some serifs can work well on monitors. Similarly, for the
applications that I suspect are of greatest interest to this group
monospaced fonts work better than proportional fonts. Simple automated
pretty printing almost requires a monospaced font.

I suggest an exampination of the comp.fonts FAQ, (particularly the
section on typography)

http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ.html

the NASA interface component style guide

http://groucho.gsfc.nasa.gov/Code_520/Code_522/Documents/HCI_Guidelines/Interface_Component_Design.html

-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2     FAX: (505)-667-3815
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