Legibility of Perceptually-Tuned Grayscale Fonts

K. O'Regan, N. Bismuth, R.D. Hersch, A. Pappas

IEEE Int. Conf. Image Processing, 1996, Proceedings ICIP-96 (Ed. P. Delogne), Vol. 1, 537-540

Perceptually-tuned grayscale fonts are generated from character outline descriptions by applying to them a set of modifications specifically conceived for strengthening thin character parts, obtaining well-contrasted bars and preserving important relationships between character shape parts. The present study aims at comparing the legibility of perceptually-tuned grayscale and bilevel display fonts at small and very small sizes ( 6, 8 and 10 pt). The study confirms the results of previous studies indicating that reading speed is to a large extent independent of the typography (bilevel or grayscale) and the font size. However, perceptually-tuned grayscale characters perform better than bilevel characters for an italic string search task in a meaningless text. Regarding the subjective preferences of the test subjects, perceptually-tuned grayscale fonts at 8 and 10 point sizes received a superior rating than bilevel fonts at the same sizes.

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