X-height, m-width, and n-width are useful font-dependent length metrics. Font size is denoted in points a point is 1/72 inch, so a 12-point font occupies 1/6 of an inch vertically.
The **font size** is typically ascent + descent (but not always, alas, so two fonts with the same numerical size but using different typefaces may not line up in height!). The typical height of ascenders above the baseline is called the **ascent**, and the typical height of descenders below it is called the **descent** of the font. Capital letters also ascend above the **x-height**. Some characters have descenders dipping below the baseline others have ascenders rising above the typical height of a lowercase character (the x-height). Characters in the Latin alphabet all sit on a common baseline. Readability is essentially the usability of a display of text.Ī good discussion of the reading process can be found (). Readability can be measured by several metrics, including speed, comprehension, error rate, and subjective preference. A single fixation can consume whole words or multiple words, so fluent readers recognize the shape of an entire word, not necessarily its individual letters. Researchers studying reading and typography often make a distinction between *legibility*, which is low-level and concerns how easy it is to recognize and distinguish individual letter shapes, and *readability*, which concerns the effectiveness of the whole reading process. At the end of a line, the eye must saccade back to the beginning of the next line.
The eye does not move steadily along a line of text it proceeds in fits and starts, called **fixations** (stopping and focusing on one place to recognize a word or several words at a time) and **saccades** (an abrupt jump to the next fixation point). Most of the rest of the reading will be specific to languages that use the Latin alphabet and its corresponding fonts, however.įirst, reading is not a smoothly linear process, even though it may feel that way to introspection. Note that these high-level comments are applicable to most written languages, not just English. In keeping with our brief tours of cognitive science for each design topic, let's say a bit about what's known about reading. Reading process consists of fixations and saccades.
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