Re: 10 pt vs 12 pt

Subject: Re: 10 pt vs 12 pt
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 12:33:55 -0500




John Posada wrote:

Hi, guys...I'm having a "discussion" with my manager over some style
conventions.

First...body text must be Times New Roman.

With that said, how does anyone feel about going to 10pt for the body
text vs 12 point.

Feelings have little to do with it. What is the width of the column?


I prefer 12 pt for readability (hey...I'm 51 tomorrow

Okay, stand against that wall over there, facing those fellows with the rifles. Let's just slip this blindfold on you. Do you have anything you'd like to say now that your life has come to an end?

and the
eyeballs ain't what they used to be) and he prefers 10 pt for it's
layout aesthetics.

He's insisting on Times Roman and he wants to talk about aesthetics?!?!?! Gimme an effin break!


Does anyone have any issue on reading one or the other?

Emphatically yes. Times is a condensed face. That means you get more characters on a line in any given point size than you would in a more traditional text face. Getting more characters on a line is a good thing in a narrow newspaper column. It is a bad thing on letter-size paper. Hence the question about the column width that I asked above.

Readability is STRONGLY influenced by the number of characters on a line, whether the type is justified or flush left. If 10 pt type, at the column width you've chosen, gives you an average line length north of 70 characters, switch to 12 pt. If you've still got more than 70 characters per line, make the margins wider. In either case, use at least the standard leading (line spacing) of 1.2 times the point size. You could bump that up a point if you're still having problems with line length.

The other consideration is output resolution. If you're printing on a very low resolution device (Docutech, for example), the larger point size will give you a little better legibility of the individual glyphs. If you're printing at over 600 dpi, though, I wouldn't worry about that marginal difference.

Does anyone
know of any studies that address one over the other?

The valid studies that have been done all point to the conclusions outlined above. At some point you have to trust the advice of people with expertise based on long experience and not worry about a pseudoscientific study done by some ignorant psych major for a senior thesis.



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References:
10 pt vs 12 pt: From: John Posada

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