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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that the sans-serif is here claimed to be more readable "always". In low resolution circumstances and where single letters are to be recognized (e.g. abbreviations common in short technical instructions) I believe it's so. But I also know that if you'd give me book printed in sans-serif, I wouldn't want to read it: whenever I try, I find it very stressful. I don't have the explanation why though.

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One possibility is that, for books, the combination of low font size and bad printing techniques made serif types more readable.

For example, a P or an F without a serif may lose a stem or an arm (because the ink didn't spread uniformly) . In a sans-serif font you would have the P or F without the lower part, but by adding the serif you have a place where more ink can get, reinforcing the letter format.

See something typed on a typewriter (with a bad tape) or an old book and you'll see what I mean.

It's a similar reason for the advantage of lowercase over uppercase: the overall shape of the letter is easier to recognize if it's "bumpier," as in serif fonts.

Induce a little stress first - say, put yourself in a cockpit with a few hundred lives to protect - then try a reading experiment involving both styles. I think you'll find that in high-stress environments, the less noise the better.

What is noise vs. signal is the issue at stake here. The pro-serif people will argue that the serifs provide extra features on the glyphs, so they might provide more signal. Nevertheless my intuition says you're right.

The serifs create visual guidance for your eye as it moves down the line.

^This. As I understand it, serifs form a horizontal channel that guide the reader through long passages of text (ie. in books, blog posts). For long lists printed vertically, sans works better because there are no serifs to interrupt the eye path. This is why bullets work well - they guide the eye vertically down the page.

Taste?

If it's taste, it's at least a taste shared by (almost) all typesetters.

That would be called "convention".

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