[Sigia-l] RE: large font use

[Rob van Tol]

I'm afraid it's been 16 years since I wrote children's books (hardest thing I ever wrote), but I seem to remember talking with the editor and designer, and they explained the large font was used partly, as Boniface indicated, to fill up the page which would otherwise look empty at normal font sizes. But mainly because a children's book can be expected to be jointly read by an adult guiding a child learner, increasing the reading distances more than normal. This is usually for the adult's benefit, as children often like to hold the book and turn the pages. And children learning to read are usually encouraged to trace their finger along the words as they are spoken as an aid to attaching the spoken sounds to the symbols on the page.

I'm not sure how this common reading behavour is translated on to reading off a computer screen. Stretching out your arm to trace the words on a computer screen, for example, doesn't seem a terribly comfortable arrangement. 

However, it seems to me that the prime user issue here is not, "what is the perfect font", but "I'm still learning to read and I need mechanisms to faciliate adult guided-reading", to which a large font might be part of the answer.

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Robert van Tol

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf Of Boniface Lau
Sent: 25 November 2002 00:49
To: Christina Wodtke; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: RE: large font use (was Re: [Sigia-l] Faceted classification browsing tool

> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On
> Behalf Of Christina Wodtke
> 
> the help page wasn't really speaking kids language, which consists
> not only in easier to recognize large font (as Avi contends) but
> also lots of illustrations, simpler sentences, more frequent
> paragraph breaks and a host of other elements... 

Kids books typically have the above attributes. 

Naturally, when a page with only a couple sentences or a very short
paragraph, the font is typically set a bit larger to balance the look
of that page. This happens not just in kids books, but also in some
adult poetry books set with generous spacing.

Probably the only other places where I have seen a large block of text
set in a larger-than-usual font is those large-print books for people
who are visually challenged. But even in that case, the font is
nowhere as huge as the giant font used in the mentioned help page.

Most likely the designer had a very different setting on the monitor
used to set the help page. Thus, the page looked ok on that monitor
but looks awful on other monitors.


Boniface
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