Legibility of Condensed Perceptually-Tuned Grayscale Fonts

R.A. Morris, Univ. of Mass., Boston, R.D. Hersch, A. Coimbra

Electronic Publishing, Artistic Imaging and Digital Typography, (Eds. R.D. Hersch, J. André, H. Brown), Proc. EP'98 and RIDT'98 Conferences, St Malo, March 30-April 3, 1998, LNCS 1375, Springer-Verlag, 1998, 281-293

We analyze the quality of condensed text on LCD displays, generated with unhinted and hinted bilevel characters, with traditional anti-aliased and with perceptually-tuned grayscale characters. Hinted bi-level characters and perceptually-tuned grayscale characters improve the quality of displayed small size characters (8pt, 6pt) up to a line condensation factor of 80%. At higher condensation factors, the text becomes partly illegible. In such situations, traditional anti-aliased grayscale character seems to be the most robust variant. We explore the utility of perceptually-tuned grayscale fonts for improving the legibility of condensed text. A small advantage was found for text searching, compared to bilevel fonts. This advantage is consistent with human vision models applied to reading.

Condensed bilevel and grayscale examples (tiff files), to be visualized on a 92 dpi LCD display

• 8pt text, 100%, 80% and 70% condensation (shift-click for downloading)
• 8pt text, 60% and 50% condensation (shift-click for downloading)

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