Comment 69 for bug 650498

Thorsten - like is too strong a word. I would put it as 'accepting'. :-)

I agree that readers have expectations and that as a commercial type foundry I have to yield to such expectations to a certain degree. But at the same time it is our job as designers to improve a situation and I strongly believe that the current design proposal needs improvement. The design study by Andreas Stroetzner is interesting - some of the shapes I have investigated myself in my doodles for a decent cap Eszett (shudder! :-) ). IMO, the most interesting solutions in that document are the simplest ones such as the 'S' with a slash through. It uses a familiar glyph that represents the sound, and the slash denotes a different character, changing the soft 'S' sound to a strong, sharp one.

To return to the subject of familiarity, and thus legibility, there have been hundreds of studies in the past, and there will be hundreds of studies in the future. So far, there isn't a single one that with certainty says how we read and process written information. One thing is for certain, however - we read best what we are used to reading. Our grand-parents were perfectly fine reading Blackletter, whilst our kids (my teenage son) would be hard pressed deciphering a Blackletter text. I once did a small animation study replacing the vowels with unrelated symbols. Interestingly enough, legibility was only affected for a short time and quickly a sentence could be read with almost as little intereference as if there were the recognised vowel. But I digress...