Surprised that nobody actually mentioned some real-life examples, including size, face and leading. If there is not enough leading (space between lines) the reading experience is poor regardless of the font size. Adequate leading is based upon the font being used. The same leading can be perfect for one font, but either too tight, or too loose, for another font.

Research has shown that serif fonts, in spite of being more complex than sans-serif, are easier to read, perhaps because we are so conditioned to them. All newspapers, most books, and most magazines use a serif font.

For readability a spec like this is quite comfortable:

11 pt Minion on 13 pt leading, with a column width of about 3 inches.

As the column gets wider it becomes increasingly tiresome to read. I’m sure we have all seen batshit crazy web pages of text stretching across the entire screen that are virtually unreadable.

World-class publications are quite strict about readability and rarely make an error in this department. Look at the New York Times or The New Yorker magazine.

Lastly, the web has made it easy to set your text against ridiculous backgrounds, or to make the font a color other than black. The recent popularity of grey has unfortunately spread to the world of typography, putting criminally hard-to-read text, often at small sizes, in front of our tired eyes. Can you imagine buying a novel typeset with grey letters? Even Quora is guilty, as these words you are reading are grey, not black. Perhaps a case can be made for doing this, but it really boils down to legibility and reading comfort.

I know this is hopelessly dated but black letters on white is always best!

Thanks for reading.

Before I get down to answering, let me post some text here using a few different typefaces.

Which of these, according to you, is the most readable of the lot?

(Picked one? Cool. We’ll come back to this shortly).

Alright. Let’s get one thing out of the way at the outset: Readable is not the same thing as legible. Legibility is about the typeface itself…how easily you can tell one character from another (is that an I, an l or a 1; an O or a 0?); readability is about aesthetics, how inviting and easy it is for you to go through a piece of text.

To put it another way, legibility comes down to the choices of a type designer—the x-heights and counters and contrasts and other terms we’re not going to touch on here.

Readability is different.

While it still requires a typeface to be well designed (and legible), far more important roles are played by numerous other factors: the medium it is used (print, web or signage), where it is used (headline, body copy or mice type), how it is displayed, and a whole lot more.

Let’s go back now to the choices I posted at the beginning of this answer. Here are the same five typefaces, used in a body of text. Which of these would you now say is the easiest to read? Is it the same choice you made at the start?

All five are set at the exact same point size, with the exact same leading. If you are like most people, I’ll wager you initially went with one of the prettier typefaces, but picked the plain-looking (but easier to read) Number 4 the second time around.

Here’s the thing, though: You wouldn’t be wrong with your first choice…if I had used the same font in a headline.

So here we have the situation where the very same font is readable and inviting in one instance, but less so in another.

But wait…it gets more interesting.

If I had used the same typefaces with default tracking and kerning (space between characters, which I had tightened above), what you consider most readable might change again. Why? Because with headlines, you typically need to close up the spacing from the default for it to look good, i.e., be more readable.

Top, with default settings, and above with tight tracking and kerning

(Conversely, small mice type—often used for disclaimers in ads—needs loose tracking to be more easily readable).

To take it one more step, you might make a completely different choice if I set the headlines in uppercase.

With me still? Good, because that’s not all.

The serif typeface that is so pleasant in that paperback you’re reading? Chances are, if you see it used on a website, you might find it a little less inviting.

So what happened here? It’s the same typeface after all.

Well yes…except that screen resolution is a lot lower than print. The delicate serifs that look good in a book result in “jaggies” on a monitor, where software workarounds like anti-aliasing and font hinting are used to approximate what you’d see in print.

If you’ve ever wondered why sans serif fonts with their cleaner forms have historically been so much more common online than in print, well, now you know. Thankfully, screen resolutions have improved dramatically in recent years, though we’re not quite on par with print yet.

Add to all this is the subjectivity of who is doing the reading. A font that appears very readable to you might be perceived very differently by someone more used to seeing text in another letterform.

To use an extreme example, a century ago, a typographical dispute raged in Germany over whether Blackletter or the Roman script was easier to read. Those more familiar with reading Blackletter claimed it was superior because “the word images are clearer” and “doesn’t cause near-sightedness”.

What is considered more readable can depend on who is doing the reading.

There are other aspects as well. Which typeface wins in a readability test will depend on what point size each of them is set at, how differently they are kerned, the leading, the column widths, reading distance…

All of which is a long-winded way of saying there is no uniform way to define one typeface being more readable than another.

So what makes some fonts more readable than others? In this writer’s opinion: The skills of a graphic designer.

Well, you do not define “bigger” or “smaller.”

There has been considerable research in this area. Results have depended on a lot of other variables as well, besides point size. But the answer is:

For extensive reading, there is an optimal size range for any given combination of content, other formatting, typeface, and reading conditions. You can always find some larger size beyond which going larger will slow down reading, and some smaller size beyond which going smaller will slow down reading. But there is typically a solid “good range.”

Also, at the small end, as with other factors such as line length, there may be a range in which smaller text is actually read slightly faster, but readers are not as happy with the reading experience. So one must be careful because performance is usually used as a proxy for ease of reading—but when both are examined, it is apparent they are not precisely the same thing.

If you are reading small or almost illegible characters all the time, it can cause eye strain and possibly damage the eye sight. Reading small letters requires extreme squinting from close distance, which will develop short-sightedness (myopia).

If you find yourself reading small text for a long period of time, please get a good ol’ magnifying glass. One instance of that is reading small texts on phone screen, and fortunately you can combat that by increasing the font size.

Photo credit: Focus on Typography: Space — SitePoint

If given that text size is same in all instance, other factor that could cause serious eye strain includes (typography terms ahead) bad kerning, bad tracking, bad leading and even bad font choice! Meaning, given that a text size is comfortable enough to read, there are many else factor that would affect the reading pleasure.

It is the duty of a graphic designer (or even copywriter, sometimes) to make sure essential information are nicely laid out. Bad designer makes rich optometrist, haha!

In a word, serifs.

Serifs—those small lines at the upper and lower ends of the strokes of letters—speed up horizontal eye movement. Designers who read know this. Designers who don’t, don’t.

Researchers like Cyril Burt studied the mechanics of reading. When you read, your eye moves along a line of text making little jumps from one cluster of words to another.

At each of these stops (Burt called them fixations) you absorb some words and move on to the next little cluster. How fast you do this—and how much you retain of what you read—depends on your proficiency as a reader and on the legibility of the type. Which in turn depends on such factors as design, point size, space between characters (kerning), space between lines (leading), line length and so on.

Typesetters and printers had long insisted that the optimum line length for readability was half again the length of the alphabet—thirty-nine characters, give or take. Burt validated some of these rules of thumb in his tests and summarized the results in A Psychological Study of Typography (Cambridge University Press, 1959).

Books have around sixty characters per line, counting spaces. But if you use longer line lengths—say ninety or more characters per line—your eyes skip ahead to the next line and readership plummets.

Notice how narrow newspaper columns are? Not all of them are thirty-nine characters wide—some are a tad wider—but they’re in the ballpark. And notice how most newspapers and magazines tend to use serif type instead of sans serif type?

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for sans serif fonts, you understand. Copy set in sans serif type can look elegant and contemporary. If your headlines are terse and your copy is consistently short, sans serif type won’t be much of a handicap.

I wasn’t thrilled when Apple switched from Apple Garamond (ITC Garamond condensed to 80% of its standard width) to Myriad in 2003. But nobody else seemed to mind, so what do I know? Besides, Apple copy is much shorter than it used to be.

Back when I was writing copy for the Apple website, we had some explaining to do. Our computers had slower processors (Motorola lagged behind the industry standard Intel, at least in the public’s perception), they cost a lot more than PCs, and they had a smaller library of available software titles. And Steve Jobs wanted us to explain all those things in a way that made sense, so Apple could get off life support and start running around and dating again.

Anyway, Myriad wasn’t the first sans serif typeface Apple used—or the last. Apple used Gill Sans for the Newton MessagePad in the 1990s. Designed by former stonemason and pedophile Eric Gill, Gill Sans had echoes of Edward Johnston’s Underground Alphabet, the iconic typeface used by the London Underground.

Used with snappy headlines, Gill Sans was readable. (Your handwriting, unhappily, was not. Handwriting recognition was the Newton MessagePad’s most ballyhooed feature, so customers did not take kindly to this deficiency.)

Anyway, Apple now uses sans serif type like Lucida Grande, Helvetica Neue and San Francisco as system fonts. I must admit they look crisp and clean and Apple-like. Someone at Apple clearly knows much more about typography than I do.

That said, I’m abnormally sensitive to type. When Fortune magazine switched from Century Old Style to Times Roman, I canceled my subscription in protest. Nobody heard that tree fall in the forest.

Some fonts are deceptively beautiful and distinctive, but read like an optical torture test. Galliard is an example of this phenomenon. Matthew Carter based Galliard on a typeface Robert Granjon hand-cut in the sixteenth century, and it’s an uncommonly graceful font.

But Galliard is afflicted by a strange malady. It hurts your eyes and gets really, really hard to read after a while. Carter designed Galliard for Merganthaler in 1978. It’s the perfect typeface for a business card or a masthead, but it’s not suitable for extended reading.

I can’t put my finger on why this is. Maybe it’s Galliard’s idiosyncratic serifs, but the typeface just doesn’t work for long copy. It’s the typeface Library of America uses for its collection of classics by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather and others. Reading a whole chapter in Galliard is a good way to get a splitting headache. It’s a serif font that somehow doesn’t do it for me.

Comic Sans may be the most widely derided typeface out there. It happens to be the one typeface that dyslexics can read with any degree of ease, a fact that got obscured when some unspeakable idiot gave it a name that lent itself to ridicule. I have no idea who that was, but I picture him as some dude with his hair teased into a Dairy Queen confection (not the root beer floats, though; those are pretty good).

Some typefaces are simply more readable than others. I have always hated Baskerville, but this serif font tests very well for readability, comprehension and retention. Again, that just shows how little I know about typography.

The smallest ‘readable’ font size is 8. This is what’s commonly referred to as ‘fine print’. Many people require reading glasses to read it. Most print is either 10 or 12 point (12 pt font produces about 500 words/page). However, the larger the print, the farther away you can be and be able to read it. That’s why the font on signs on buildings or road signs is so large so that you can read it quickly before it passes you by.

As you get older and your eyesight diminishes, larger fonts help you to continue to be able to decipher the print. Kindle readers and other tablets that allow for an adjustment of the size of the print are wonderful in this aspect because they allow the print to be enlarger without affecting the spacing of the words or the hyphenating on the page.

If the font size is too large, you won’t be able to read the whole word. So there has to be a happy medium. If your eyesight is good, 10 to 12 point font is the happy medium.

Presbyopia

​By Ben Wilkinson 2021 May

In the human embryo, the lens of the eye starts as a piece of ectoderm (skin). It is attracted by a bud from the brain, which eventually produces the retina, and sinks below the surface to form the lens. Like other skin structures, the lens continues to produce cells throughout life. However, it cannot be allowed to increase beyond slightly, so it increases in hardness.

The lens hardens at a remarkably predictable rate. In the ‘normal’ (emmetropic) eye, the stiffening of the lens leads to loss of accommodation, so that the near point retreats to about 30 cm by about 45 years of age, and reading glasses (+ lenses) start to be needed. This loss of near vision is termed ‘presbyopia’.

The lens continues to harden, and the near point to retreat. Eventually, the lens becomes so hard that cracks and splits begin to appear. When these interfere with vision, it is termed ‘cataract’.

Presbyopia is treated by using different lenses for distance and near, either in the form of two pairs of glasses, or, more commonly, using bifocals of some form. Until recently, bifocals were two distinct lenses in the same frame, but more advanced optics have allowed for a form of slope between the two lenses. This allows sharp focus at all distances, provided that the correct part of the lens is used. These are termed 'multifocals', or 'progressives'. Some people find this need to use a specific part of the lens for each distance, difficult, they may need regular bifocals.

WADR, a poorly phrased question. The answer is not either or.

Personally, when I am in my office or at home, I use my laptop as my primary interface device (much of my real work involves servers which have limited display handling).

The laptop screen and keyboard are serviceable, but not optimal for reading and extensive keyboarding. The solution to this, which I use and have recommended to clients is: use a laptop with docking stations at home and office. The docking station is connected to a full-size screen, a full-size keyboard, and a conventional pointing device (e.g., mouse or trackball). This gives one all of the benefits of a desktop combined with the availability of a laptop when not at one’s normal locations.

If one is careful with choices of laptop, other members of your household can use the same docking station. One can even have multiple docking stations at home or the office, to be used by compatible laptops.

Use the scaling option under the Display tab in settings menu. It will be under Scaling and Layout. If you only want to change the text size without making the app menus smaller, use the advanced scaling settings option in blue letters. The warning in yellow letters is Windows simply telling you that the settings have been changed from default. The higher the resolution on your monitor, the smaller you will be able to make your text. Hope this helps.

Yes, but it’s not necessarily going to be better for you.

The interesting thing is that you will probably have to make a decision whether you want your font easier to read, or whether you want to remember the content of your text better. So I suspect if you want to read a novel, it’s best to go for a typeface that is easy to read, whereas arguably your school books should be harder to read. Strange, is it not?

It has been found that exposure to a typeface—in other words, familiarity to it—makes it easier to interpret, presumably because you have internalized the shapes and thus are quicker to interpret words rather than letters. This does not negate the historical progress in typography however. We used to read blackletters and that was our norm. They are dark and relatively big, and so, although familiarity to it eased our reading of it, it has never been the most efficient style. In the centuries after that, typefaces featured a reduction in typographic color (the density of black on white space) and thus a better balance between black and white space. So there has definitely been an evolution in typefaces towards improved readability, although it’s not entirely clear to what extent this is actually independent of familiarity to it.

However, tests have been done in the importance of familiarity of typefaces in relation to reading performance and user preference

But yes, familiarity to a typeface does make it easier to read. It’s thus important to acknowledge that certain typefaces may become easier to read for you given extensive exposure, but if the public at large does not endure the same exposure, you cannot expect them to be able to read the text with the same proficiency and speed as you would. I’ve seen and read quite a few blackletter manuscripts and thus find it a lot easier to read than most people today would. And the same is also true for black metal logos; the more of them you see, the easier they are to read/decipher.

On the other hand, different tests have indicated that typefaces that are harder to read promote better recall

• Martin Silvertant’s answer to What is the best font to use for memorizing?

Familiarity to a typeface can undermine the effects just described however. Once you become familiar to the letter forms, text becomes easier to read and thus the deeper processing strategies disappear—at least in part. But note that the first test indicated that exposure to a typeface only has a limited effect, and that the letter forms are still very important for the ease of reading.

In conclusion, yes, there is some correlation between the extent of exposure to a typeface and the ease at which it can be read. On the other hand, ease of reading is not necessarily the best method if you want to internalize the content better. So although typography tends to focus on ease of reading, perhaps there are some instances where lesser readable typefaces can be strategically employed.

So when your teacher tells you that your handwriting is horrendous and you should work on it, tell them that you are employing deeper processing strategies.

Texts are a collection of letters and words which are printed or displayed in a particular style and size. With the fast pace of technological development everywhere and expanding use of computer based instruction such as online courses, students spend more time on a computer screen than printed media .

Texts have been the main element to convey messages across culture which has also been an important element for learning. The main goal of this research is to measure the effects of font type and spacing of on screen text and in improving and boosting the learner’s ability to read easily and retain information while enhancing their reading speed and comprehension from on screen text.

Font is a set of letterings that are printed or shown in a particular style and size. In computer based instructional design, selection of suitable fonts has an influence on students, specifically in terms of distinguishing and understanding the signs successfully. When the letters are put together to create words, the feature of identifying these characters is significant for perfect readability. On-screen font type, are fonts that have been considered from the start to optimally render typographic features (features such as x-height, spacing, and serifs that increase legibility) on the bitmapped screens of computers. Therefore, making efforts to overcome an understandable technical limitation of on-screen text display is necessary.

Serif fonts such as Times New Roman is normally observed as the most readable font family for printed text Many web designers say that san serif fonts, such as Arial or Verdana, have a better screen readability especially at small sizes than other serif fonts (Peck, 2003; Powell, 2002; Wilson, 2001).

Previous readability research has concentrated on the effects of typeface and page layout variables on reading rate and comprehension, psychological and mental human factors (Holmes, 1986). Furthermore, the research was related to reading rate and reading understanding the text (Holmes, 1986).

In the case of eyes, reading ebooks on a desktop is the same as software engineers working long hours in front of the computer.

Glare is a problem when staring at the computer. Also when staring at screens people blink less than they ideally should which makes their eyes dry.

These can be taken care of with simple lifestyle modifications. Using anti glare screens, blinking consciously, taking breaks from computer for 5 mins every hour of computer work, to stare at distant objects in the street outside regularly. Also sometimes even lubricating eye drops provide good relief from occupational/computer dry eye.

Also maintain a good posture while using computers for long durations.

If all the above measures are kept in mind there should be no problem reading ebooks on desktop

Thanks for the A2A User

Generally, what is easiest to read is what people are accustomed to reading, so they aren’t distracted by the typeface. In terms of vision and what is pleasant to read, faces with the characteristics of ‘old style’ types, that is, typefaces based on designs from the 1500s to 1600s, most notably those of Claude Garamond; Adobe and Stempel Garamond, Sabon, and Minion are typical examples.

In terms of ease of reading, there is no evidence that sans serifs are inherently more difficult to read, though they may need more leading, and should be ‘normally’ proportioned (sans serif faces often have varieties of character width, as in ‘condensed’ and ‘extended’ versions) and will probably need to be set smaller, as their x-height is usually larger. Which brings me to size….

The most important aspect of size from the point of view of appearance and reading is not the point size, but the x-height. I would avoid going below an x-height size of 4 pts for long reading. So 11 point in one size (Charter) will appear considerable larger than another (American Garamond).

Aleo Font is a sans serif typeface which is the easiest font for reading and it is most ideal for a paragraph or any longer textual design arrangements.

They featuring neat & clean texture with proper baselines. So, they clearly deliver the right message to readers.

“I use freefontslike to download it for free. They are providing it without any hustle"

It depends a lot on context.

If you are talking about intensive reading (like reading books) and if the laptop screen or the desktop monitor are backlit (99% of today’s screens are) then none! They are damaging to your eyes and will interfere with your sleeping patterns. In this scenario I’m assuming you’re also looking at a screen for work. So you’re planning on adding more hours of looking at backlit screens, which eye doctors and psychologists recommend strongly against.

If you must… then invest into an OLED monitor. It strains the eye a lot less (but still interferes with sleeping patterns).

Some of the psychological effects can be limited by using blue-light-blocking glasses (although I’m not sure how well researched this aspect is).

OLED screens are expensive but most premium Smartphones today already use OLED. However, the comparatively tiny screen of a phone will strain the eye for different reasons.

If you can, use a non self-iluminated alternative, such as e-ink ebook readers and a reading lamp. They present to the eye an *almost* identical scenario compared to paper books.

Now if we’re not talking about intensive reading then… whatever form factor suits you better. You can use the laptop everywhere while the desktop alternative will mean you’ll do your non-intensive reading mainly in once place only.

Happy reading and take care of your eyes!

It’s doctrinally better to use bookmarks — which was why it was invented in the first place.

I won’t bore you (or anyone else) why bookmarks got invented — I don’t want to spin off into surrealism about parchment and paper damage from folding and all that jazz. It’s common sense to see any folding weakens the substrate material and bad for long-term archiving.

Other than that, it depends on the ‘price’ of the thing. If it’s an expensive job, honestly you don’t want to fold the pages. And you’d probably have a heart attack if ever anyone does that to your books. It nearly always ends up the fold working its way to damage. That’s why we have the expression dog-earred to refer to busted book corners.

But if it’s a paperback thing, just fold the corner.

Live dangerously at least once in your lifetime, please.

It’s just easier on the eyes. That being the case, if you find yourself glossing over text, you may consider enlarging the font. But if you are just browsing the internet, use CTRL and the + key to enlarge the page, and CTRL and - to reduce again.

You can also increase all fonts in Display settings under Scale and layout. I have a 43 inch 4k screen, so I have scale set to 200%. Otherwise I couldn’t even read the menus of apps.

I agree with Mercedes' answer. Some fonts are easier to read than others, but it sounds as if you are reading a screen, so I would definitely change the screen colour for reading ease, if you find that it helps you. In the Word programme, page colour can be found in the Design menu, then go to 'page background', then 'page color'. I can feel my eye muscles relax when I change from white to cream. Similarly, for your own reading, print out onto pastel coloured paper, in a shade that your eyes prefer.

The best font is the one that suits you, but in dyslexia practice it is felt that the two-story letter 'a' helps readability, also, using a font size of about 14. You can change it all back afterwards if you have to present your script in a particular style and size.

Q: What are the easiest fonts to read?

A: My coworkers and I have debated this very question for decades.

• Between us we have collected thousands of fonts, and have even paid for several font collections out of our own pockets
• We meticulously would print and reprint drafts in different fonts (so we wouldn't waste paper, each editor’s draft would get a different font, because the editor was editing words not layout nor looks) so we could then argue endlessly about which one looked best.
• This was all powered by the Apple’s desktop publishing revolution on the Macintosh, so we have been debating fonts since the 1980s.
• What we found after decades of arguments and untold thousands (maybe millions) of printed pages i that we don't print on paper anymore and that on the screen we still like Helvetica. Yes, that is true, we like Helvetica’s clean looks and we all use it now so we stop wasting time rummaging through thousands of fonts to find something obscure that no on has installed on their system (so they can't see it anyway on their displays) because Helvetica is the one font to run them all.
• Now fast forward to 2019 and we each have quietly switched to using IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans Serif for documents that we send rot each other.
• IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans Serif are essentially Helvetica that has had its limitations corrected. Upper case I and lower case l now look like two different characters in IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans Serif, whereas they look like the same character in Helvetica (and in too many other fonts), check it out for yourself to see the difference.
• We find that its a subtle difference between the two but if you compare them side by side you may find, like we did, that IBM Plex Serif and IBM Plex Sans Serif are easier to read while maintaining Helvetica’s clean, readable, style.
• You can download it for free: IBM Plex

If found a sans serif font name as Kanit Font, which is the most readable font for the screen. It just because of its neat and clean texture. All texture as follows proper baselines with proper height & width.

This elegant font has available in 18 styles from Regular to Extra Bold. All styles have professionally managed and they delivered the right message to the reader.

So when you need it for your work then you can download it from AnchorFonts. Because it found this typeface there and get free for personal and commercial uses.