On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, robin wrote:
> But most shop signs use all capitals (because it stands out).
I don't think so. I think most shop owners do not have the benefit of the
research reports which show that lower-case text is more legible.
Governments, which erect road signs, have the time to read, and sometimes
even the resources to commission such studies.
The reason why lower-case, for a given font size, is more legible is, I
understand, because the ascenders and descenders help to outline the shape
of the word, whereas in upper-case, all characters are the same height so
that you actually have to decode each letter rather than the overall shape
of the word. Apparently most of us read, even when looking for a
road-sign at night under poor conditions, by whole-word recognition, and
not by decoding each character at a time.
Since it is much more important for a program to be read correctly by a
human than by a machine, I now write all mine in lower-case. I use other
methods to try to separate the comments. I have tried writing them all in
upper-case: works, but doesn't look very nice.
--
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester, U.K.
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