Examination of the legibility of isolated characters of onscreen typefaces

Abstract

This study reports on the legibility of digits, symbols, and letters from 20 onscreen typefaces. Participants were asked to identify individual characters after a brief exposure and performance was recorded. Classification tree analysis was used to examine the influence of specific character features on legibility. Features included attributes such as height, width, weight, stroke variation, contrast, and complexity. Results reveal the most influential features for six commonly confused characters (zero, one, "e", "l", ÷, and $). The use of classification tree analysis appears to be promising for typographers in determining the limits of typeface features and for practitioners who must choose an optimal typeface for a particular use.

The Effect of Fonts Design Features on OCR for Latin and Arabic

“…Some studies showed how font design features could affect the legibility of specific characters. One of the recent researches [10] examined the legibility of isolated letters, individual digits, and symbols of 20 onscreen typefaces. Experiment have been conducted on ten subjects completing 188 trials in which the characters were exposed in a single presentation for 34 milliseconds, and subjects were asked to name them aloud.…”

“…Moreover, the proportion between the word height WH and descender has been calculated as in (9) using letter 'Meem' ‫. )م(‬ The ratio among three measurements, tooth/loop height, ascender and descender, have been calculated using equations (10)…”