Summary

The basic question of this Ifra Special Report is: Why is it nowadays so important to deal with the legibility of typefaces, for the use in print as well as for the use in the internet? The answer to the question is not one but many. Not only one circumstance has led to the present situation, but rather a complex changing journalistic environment. Not only the reader of the publications has changed, but the reading habits, too, and last but not least the technical production of these printed matters. A small step backwards in time, 20 years ago, and one finds a completely different production method for a newspaper. The editor is responsible for writing and editing of texts. He chooses pictures and determines their size and cut. And this is where his influence on the technical components of newpaper design ends. The way further to the printed product was determined by the compositor. He used to set the editor’s typed text, at first by hand, later with the help of line composition machines and then with the help of phototypesetting machines. As typesetters, the handling and the work with typefaces was their profession, the content of the products was secondary in regard to aesthetic standards. This profession lead to a product with a good legibility. Then there was desktop publishing and with it the change to the pre-press stages. Setting and page design now were no longer part of the typesetters work but were assigned to the editor who still does this according to his best knowledge bringing forward, however, completely different demands than the typesetter. When hot-metal compostion was still in use and five lines of text were overset in an article, this was a problem that had to be solved editorially. Today five lines overflow are a problem that can be solved by technical manipulation. Therefore the disappearance of the compositor from the stage of the newspaper design is to be regarded as one of the main reasons for less clearly legible typography. Additionally there is the technical revolution of the pre-press stages now giving a totally different user a totally different tool. This new tool itself is not bad, but it allows a number of manipulations in the text, setting and type design, which used incorrectly can endanger the legibility of a text. Therefore it is new technologies and new users that determine the typographic design of newspapers at the turn of the millennium, along with all problems resulting from their use. But the readers have changed, too. Current studies about the age structure of newspaper readers show a major proportion as being members of the older generation and therefore a necessity to produce specially easy-readable products to cater for this clientèle. The younger generation, the hope of the newspaper’s future shows a completely different behaviour towards the reception of text. Elderly readers tend to struggle through longer stretches of text persistently and the younger read-ers are more interested in short, quick pieces of information. These new readers have learned to read selectively. The effects of television and computer reflect on the reading habits of a newspaper reader. A text that seems to be of bad legible quality, unattractive, is skipped, not taken notice of. What is it that "readable" stands for? The common meaning of legible means "clear enough to read". While even some professionals mix those two terms, they are separate, but connected aspects of typography. Legibility stands for the single character, the single word, the single text and its perception. If a text can be easily recognised by the reader we call it legible. So legibility describes most of the typographic influences that have been discussed in this study. While legibility describes the single text, readability is the term used to describe the quality and understanding of the complete article, or the whole page. So it is the combination of visual elements like pictures or infographics with text in various lenghts that is described by readability. If the columns of a newspaper can be read for a longer time without difficulty we call it readable. So readability describes the combination between layout and typography, while legibility is a sole typographic term. Therefore the improvement of the legibility and readability of a publication is not merely an instrument to satisfy only one target group, but more than that, a necessary, in many cases overdue, measure with one goal: to sell a product that has been created very well not only by its contents but as a well-designed typographic product, too.