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In the early 1980s, letters rasterized from outline fonts at low and medium resolutions had irregular shapes. The lower the resolutions, the greater the irregularities, and the more that typographers criticized the type quality. PostScript fonts, launched in 1985, regularized medium resolution type with secret ingredients coyly called "hints" by Adobe. This prompted competing inventions of font regularization using techniques variously called "instructions," "delta exceptions," "procedures," "intelligence," and other terms sounding more like hi-tech snake oil than science. Further research and open publication, however, revealed their connections to traditional aesthetics of letter symmetry as well as to modern signal processing, pattern recognition, and psychophysics, thus expanding our understanding of typography in digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Font Wars were a decades-long competition in the computer industry for dominance in font technology, viewed as a key success factor for personal computing platforms. The Font Wars spurred innovative scientific research into the small, nearly subliminal forms of the printed letters on which modern civilization was based, yet which had received little scrutiny outside the printing trades. More than a business episode, the Font Wars were above all a manifestation and translation of ideas—some modern, some ancient, some theoretical, some practical—into computer software and hardware. At the heart of the Font Wars was a fundamental question: What is the best way to turn traditional printed letter forms into digital fonts for computer screens and printers? Answers to this question were researched, implemented, and launched into the marketplace, where their intense competition transformed the 500 year tradition of printing and publishing, placing the electronic literacy on the screens of billions of digital displays, computers, tablets, and smart phones around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 20th century, reading researchers expressed optimism that scientific study of reading would improve the legibility of typefaces. Font-making was, however, complex, expensive and impractical for reading research, which was therefore restricted to standard commercial fonts. The adoption of computer typography in legibility studies makes the measurement, modification and creation of experimental fonts easier, while display of text on computer screens facilitates reading studies. These technical advances have spurred innovative research. Some studies continue to test fonts for efficient reading in low vision as well as normal vision, while others use novel fonts to investigate visual mechanisms in reading. Some experimental fonts incorporate color and animation features that were impractical or impossible in traditional typography. While it is not clear that such innovations will achieve the optimistic goals of a century ago, they extend the investigation and understanding of the nature of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a commentary on 'The utility of image descriptions in the initial stages of vision: A case study of printed text' (Watt & Dakin, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]