Affiliations: Széchenyi István University, Győr, Hungary
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: András Horváth, Széchenyi István University, Győr, Hungary. E-mail: horvatha@sze.hu.
Abstract: Selecting a good typeface (or font) has a high importance in typography, web-design, ergonomics and similar fields. A key concept of this topic is the legibility of the fonts, which measures how easy it is to recognise the difference between the letters in a specific typeface. The typical investigations to measure this feature are based on human experiments. In this paper, a new approach and a simulation software are proposed to measure font legibility. A program, that simulates the distortion effects of the human retina is applied to test images of characters and optical character recognition software is used to investigate its output. This way the optical, biological, and cognitive steps of human character recognition is modelled. Although, the simulation cannot be perfect, the computer program can investigate much more fonts, characters with a lot of settings (e.g. for different visual acuity) than human experiments and gives reproducible results that are independent of fatigue, misunderstanding and other human limits.
Keywords: Font legibility, human vision, retina, simulation, character recognition
