![]() ![]() ![]() What’s unusual is not so much the measurement system, but that terms from these metal type days are still used today. So, mixing type from various foundries was difficult. ![]() Prior to that, different type foundries had different ways of measuring their type. The size and shape of printed symbols determine the legibility of text.A standard system of measurement within typography came about in the late 19th century. In this paper, we focus on print size because of its crucial role in understanding reading performance and its significance in the history and contemporary practice of typography. We present evidence supporting the hypothesis that the distribution of print sizes in historical and contemporary publications falls within the psychophysically defined range of fluent print size-the range over which text can be read at maximum speed. ![]() The fluent range extends over a factor of 10 in angular print size (x-height) from approximately 0.2° to 2°. Assuming a standard reading distance of 40 cm (16 inches), the corresponding physical x-heights are 1.4 mm (4 points) and 14 mm (40 points). We provide new data on the distributions of print sizes in published books and newspapers and in typefounders' specimens, and consider factors influencing these distributions. We discuss theoretical concepts from vision science concerning visual size coding that help inform our understanding of historical and modern typographical practices. While economic, social, technological, and artistic factors influence type design and selection, we conclude that properties of human visual processing play a dominant role in constraining the distribution of print sizes in common use. Our goal is to review key ideas on the distribution and effects of print size from the two very different disciplinary perspectives of vision science and typography. These two disciplines focus on the same graphical–visual phenomena-text-but from different viewpoints. Typography presents a plethora of features and forms with aesthetic and practical significance, but typographical explanation tends to be historical and anecdotal. Psychophysics provides quantitative studies of forms, patterns, dots, lines, and gratings that are simpler than typographic characters, but psychophysical theories rarely address potential connections between artistic designs and established properties of visual processing. Examples of vision science studies of artistic and literate forms include the interpretation of the block portraits by artist Chuck Close by Pelli ( 1999), the analysis of Mona Lisa's smile by Livingstone ( 2000), and the proposed linkage between letter topology and visual contour analysis by Changizi, Zhang, and Shimojo ( 2006). We begin laying the groundwork for our ecological hypothesis by discussing metrics for print size used by typographers and vision scientists. Next, we present psychophysical data on reading performance, demonstrating that fluent reading is restricted to a broad but limited range of print sizes.Ĭonfusion over definitions of print size has been an impediment to communication between the two disciplines, but common ground is necessary to understand our hypothesis. The essential claim of our ecological hypothesis is that print sizes in most contemporary and historical publications fall within this fluent range. Before describing two tests of the ecological hypothesis, we devote a section of the paper to reviewing current explanations from vision science for the extent of the fluent range. In our first test of the hypothesis, we survey contemporary newspapers, hardcover novels, and paperbacks to determine whether the observed distribution of print sizes falls within the fluent range. ![]()
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