news&views Autumn 2018 | Page 25

Letters to the Editor To the editor: My wife and I do not appreciate the large font size. Diffi cult to read and uses too much paper. Denis and Betty-Ann Beaudry To the editor: I was at one time editor of a twenty-page brain- injury-related newsletter called “Hi Hope!” One of the things I debated with my number three son, Curtis, was whether to use a serif or a non-serif font. He was in favor of a sans-serif one; I was in favor of a serif font. Since I was the editor, I made the fi nal decision. I notice you use both, but mainly a serif font. Harlan Hulleman A Note from the Editor I don’t usually make any comments about letters because it is never fair to give the editor the last word with no hope of reply. However, since both of these letters are about letters, I’ll break that rule. One of the points of key importance to us is the legibility of our text to all of our readers, some of whom have serious issues with vision. While it is not practical for us to produce a magazine in a style that would both be legible to those with extremely bad vision and attractive to those who need no assistance at all, it is possible to improve legibility without sacrifi cing the beauty of the fonts that we select. Always, function trumps form, though; and the fonts we use in our magazine are diff erent from those that ARTA uses in most of its other documents. We spent a long time fi nding fonts that work, and we are proud of what we’ve chosen. Serif or sans serif? Well, many sources, including the CNIB and the Hull York medical school, opt for sans serif fonts like, say, Arial or Verdana. The problem with them is in the characters 1li|I that, even to an unimpaired eye, look awfully similar. Other sources point to a serif font like Times Roman as being more legible, and serif fonts are our choice. We have a couple that work well for legibility and are not too clunky. The fonts, along with a few other things that we do like avoiding printing colour on colour (mostly), are conscious choices that we make so that the magazine is easier to read. news&views AUTUMN 2018 | 25