You are reading a single comment by @bq and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@bq
Yes, when it is written about a subject that changes so much as to be unrecognisable in the 6 years since the author wrote it.
Look at the tiny screen he has. On that his 100% font size looks tiny. He's also using a Mac which back then had a terrible screen font rendering engine and demanded bigger fonts to cope with the fuzzy letter edges. (and isn't much better now)
On mine, which is by no means a very big screen, but is a lot newer, that 100% is fucking huge. This is because the world has moved on completely since he wrote that crap, and Windows 7 has beautifully crisp sub-pixel rendering and you can set your own DPI to suit. Even at the very smallest this text is twice as big as my normal system text now.
If you want to take anything from that article, how about
You have to consider that if he knew what he was talking about and was really concerned about readability he wouldn't have set his article in a serif font.
The main scientific reason he is wrong is that we do not actually recognise and read words by looking at their letters. We recognise word shapes. We even recognise sentence shapes. Our brains store these shapes for future use and recall them instantly, enabling us to read much much faster than if we had to actually read the letters and construct each word they spelled. By increasing the font size to such a degree you have made it too big to do this easily, essentially reducing the number of words that we can scan in one go.
By making the letters bigger you therefore do not necessarily increase readability. Once the text is big enough to render the letters properly then it's probably big enough to read