Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

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I'm surprised by the strength of your comment. The article doesn't argue for lowercasing everything, and cites several cases (ah!) where it shouldn't hurt. Including case insensitive languages where case doesn't carry any information by definition and where it's already common practice and uncontroversial to lowercase everything, and English title case. With this in mind, my next question is:

> they greatly enhance readability

Do you have any evidence for this? My native language is not English and we use the Latin alphabet. The case for titles is the same as for regular sentences. We are doing fine. I would even say that the English title case feels somewhat odd and confusing. Titles are also virtually always set apart / rendered differently as normal text so I fail to see how normal case for titles loses information and how title case helps in any way. Actually, I even believe that title case sometimes loses information. Capital letters mark (Mark, btw :-)) proper names, this marking is lost with title case and this may sometimes bring ambiguity.

> Do you have any evidence for this?

US street and highway signage went from all caps to mixed case in the past 30 years. I believe the US Department of Transportation did studies and found mixed case was easier to read. Although they use a non-standard font.

this is because we recognize most words by shape. capital case is all single-height while lowercase is mixed height (it has letters that ascend and descend). for situations like road signs, being able to scan and see the “shape” of a word quickly is very helpful.

so that is an argument in favor of using lowercase.

This is just a myth.

While the word shape meme is a myth [1] there are some half truths to it.

It is known that mixed casing does disrupt reading [2], which gives some weight to the idea that the shapes of words and letters does affect reading.

For myself I know that my reading speed and comprehension suffers when reading title cased sentences. This leads me to always "fix" [3] documents I update or otherwise contribute to at work when others do it for headings, subheadings, headers and footers.

[1] https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9293635/

[3] I say "fix" because I know it's a generally acceptable formatting method when writing, I just don't like it.

Link 1 is wrong

Thank you for pointing that out! Correct link:

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

> In this paper, Pelli and colleagues show that when reading words that have been distorted by presenting each letter in visual noise (like an out of tune television), readers do not perform as well as an 'ideal observer' who can recognise words based on their shape alone

I said being able to see the word shape is very helpful. I did not say that you can read based on the word shape alone.

You may have said it, but you should be aware that it isn't true.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-re...

> The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text.

> Haber & Schindler (1981) found that readers were twice as likely to fail to notice a misspelling in a proofreading task when the misspelling was consistent with word shape (tesf, 13% missed) than when it is inconsistent with word shape (tesc, 7% missed). This is seemingly a convincing result until you realize that word shape and letter shape are confounded. The study compared errors that were consistent both in word and letter shape to errors that are inconsistent both in word and letter shape. Paap, Newsome, & Noel (1984) determined the relative contribution of word shape and letter shape and found that the entire effect is driven by letter shape.

Word shape is not relevant to anything.

Interesting, though one could as well conclude from this that all caps is not very readable. We need to know the actual motivation behind this change, not a supposition.

My question would be from title case to normal case for titles. We already know that normal case is readable, that's what we use for normal text.

We also know (?) that people speaking another language with a Latin alphabet don't have trouble reading titles.

Heyo, just curious what language(s) use the latin alphabet without case?

We have case, but we don't have title case. We write titles using normal case, with an upper case letter at the start and for proper names but no other words.

(French, but I think that's also true for Spanish, Italian and many other languages. I don't know if German have a specific case for titles like English but they have an upper case letter for common nouns).

Correct. Sentence case in Spanish: "El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha" and Italian: "Il nome della rosa". Sentence case also in German, with the usual rule that all nouns are capitalized: "Kritik der reinen Vernunft". Same for Russian (non-latin of course): "Война и мир".

I suspect English is the only language to use special, though not standardized, rules for titles.

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