Discovering Legible Chinese Typefaces for Reading Digital Documents

More and more fonts have sprung up in recent years in digital publishing industry and reading devices. In this paper, we focus on methods of evaluating digital Chinese fonts and their typeface characteristics to seek a good way to enhance the character recognition rate. To accomplish this, we combined psychological analysis methods with statistical analysis. It involved an extensive survey of distinctive features of eighteen popular digital typefaces. Survey results were tabulated and analyzed statistically. Then another objective experiment was conducted using the best six fonts derived from the survey results. These experimental results reveal an effective way of choosing legible digital fonts most suitable for comfortable reading of books, magazines, newspapers, and for display of texts on cell-phones, e-books, and digital libraries, and finding out the features for improving character legibility of different Chinese typefaces. The relationships among legibility, eye-strain, and myopia, will be discussed.