Faculty Bibliography

Variable width (often called proportionally-spaced) fonts pack more characters, and hence more information,into a line of text than do fixed width fonts. They are thus preferred by typographers, who use them as ameans of fitting more text on fewer pages. Does this higher density result in faster or slower reading speeds?We compared maximum reading speeds on a CRT using identical characters under three conditions ofpitch: 1) fixed width (FW), each character centered in a constant horizontal space, 2) variable width (VW),characters occupying only the space required to eliminate overlap, and 3) modified variable width (MVW),average text density equated to that of the FW condition through the addition of inter-word microspace.For small characters (close to the acuity limit), FW produced the fastest reading, with MVW yielding betterperformance than VW pitch, indicating two kinds of 'crowding' effects: one interfering with individualcharacter recognition and one interfering with word recognition. For medium and large characters (-0.25 to6 deg height), performance was best with VW pitch, slowest with MVW pitch, and intermediate with FW pitch.Hence dense text packing may improve performance with all but the smallest characters. Control experimentsusing rapid serial visual presentation of text show that the higher text density and lower eye movementrequirements of VW text are responsible for its superiority at medium and large character sizes