Principles of typography for the screen

For the past 500 years humans have been developing means of communication through the development of technology for producing and presenting pages of printed text to the reader. The idea of communicating with letters by the composition of a page grew from traditional manuscript writing of the 15th century to today\u27s electronic portable document for the World Wide Web. But unlike the properties of ink on paper, computers, monitors and electronic documents pose many new and different problems which don\u27t apply to paper. One of the major problems with viewing text on a monitor is resolution. Most monitors today have 72 dots per inch considerably less than the 2400 dots per inch used for print. The second problem associated with on-screen reading is the uncomfortable viewing conditions caused by flicker on a computer monitor. Due to these deficiencies, good font rendering on computer screens is nearly impossible. The purpose of this study was to develop a new set of typographic parameters to compensate for on-screen reading and viewing. By evaluating legibility studies for print and various studies for the legibility of computer monitors, conclusions can be made about how text should be set and arranged for the screen. In this study nine tests were designed to find the preferred characteristics of typography for the screen. The nine factors tested were: typeface, type size, leading, line length, paragraph indent, text format, hyphenation, margins and color. Each characteristic chosen for testing was based upon the viewing conditions of todays computer screens. Three-hundred and eight electronic documents were created and linked together for two testing sessions. The observers were shown various paragraphs of text and were asked to choose which paragraph was more legible to them. The preferences for each observer were marked on each final test page so that the results could be calculated. Based on the results of the testing for this experiment, using the paired comparison method, the hypothesis has been proven to be correct. Out of nine separate tests, seven principles must be changed to ensure legibility for on-screen reading. By further analysis of the results of the testing, the author found that there were no significant differences between what was preferred by male versus female observers

A comparison of the comprehension of procedural information using computer and hard-copy media

Users of technical procedures must be able to understand the documents to use them to perform their work. As more companies contemplate putting their procedures on-line, it is important to know whether computer systems will be as effective as traditional hard-copy presentation in communicating procedures to the employees who must use them; To determine whether there is a relationship between computer usage and the comprehension of technical procedures, an experiment was conducted among employees of a scientific and technical company in Las Vegas, Nevada. A control group read and demonstrated its comprehension of hard-copy procedures only, while an experimental group read and demonstrated its comprehension of a hard-copy and then an on-line procedure; The experimental group selected fewer correct answers on a comprehension test for the on-line than for the hard-copy procedure. This suggests that when readers accustomed to the hard-copy medium switch to the computer medium, comprehension decreases

Users' perception of relevance of spoken documents

We present the results of a study of user's perception of relevance of documents. The aim is to study experimentally how users' perception varies depending on the form that retrieved documents are presented. Documents retrieved in response to a query are presented to users in a variety of ways, from full text to a machine spoken query-biased automatically-generated summary, and the difference in users' perception of relevance is studied. The experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of advanced multimedia information retrieval applications may be affected by the low level of users' perception of relevance of retrieved documents

Creating Structured PDF Files Using XML Templates

This paper describes a tool for recombining the logical structure from an XML document with the typeset appearance of the corresponding PDF document. The tool uses the XML representation as a template for the insertion of the logical structure into the existing PDF document, thereby creating a Structured/Tagged PDF. The addition of logical structure adds value to the PDF in three ways: the accessibility is improved (PDF screen readers for visually impaired users perform better), media options are enhanced (the ability to reflow PDF documents, using structure as a guide, makes PDF viable for use on hand-held devices) and the re-usability of the PDF documents benefits greatly from the presence of an XML-like structure tree to guide the process of text retrieval in reading order (e.g. when interfacing to XML applications and databases)

Reading the Readers: Modelling Complex Humanities Processes to Build Cognitive Systems

The ink and stylus tablets discovered at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda are a unique resource for scholars of ancient history. However, the stylus tablets have proved particularly difficult to read. This paper describes the initial stages in the development of a computer system designed to aid historians in the reading of the stylus tablets. A detailed investigation was undertaken, using Knowledge Elicitation techniques borrowed from Artificial IntelliJOURce, Cognitive Psychology, and Computational Linguistics, to elicit the processes experts use whilst reading an ancient text. The resulting model was used as the basis of a computer architecture to construct a system which takes in images of the tablets and outputs plausible interpretations of the documents. It is demonstrated that using Knowledge Elicitation techniques can further the understanding of complex processes in the humanities, and that these techniques can provide an underlying structure for the basis of a computer system that replicates that process. As such it provides significant insight into how experts work in the humanities, whilst providing the means to develop tools to assist them in their complex task

Reading with new tools: An evaluation of Personal Digital Assistants as tools for reading course materials

Lightweight, palmtop devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) can now be used for reading electronic text, opening up their potential as learning tools. This paper reports a study that evaluated the use of PDAs for reading course materials by students on an Open University master's course. The research is grounded in activity theory, which provides a useful framework for examining how the introduction of a new tool changes an existing activity. Student perceptions of the possibilities and constraints of the PDA, as determined by questionnaires and interviews, reveal the impact the new tool had upon reading. The PDA constrained reading with limitations such as the small screen size, new requirements for navigating through the text and awkward methods for taking notes. These conditions made it difficult for students to skim‐read the text, to move back and forth within the document and to interact with the text as easily as they could with paper. Nevertheless, students welcomed the opportunity to have the course materials on a portable, lightweight device that could be used at any time and in any place. This made it easier to fit the reading activity around the various other activities in which students were involved In addition, the PDA was used in conjunction with existing tools, such as the printed version of the course materials and the desktop computer. Therefore, it was not seen to replace paper but rather to extend and complement it. The findings are discussed using concepts from activity theory to interpret how the new tool modified the reading activity

Visual analysis of document triage data

As part of the information seeking process, a large amount of effort is invested in order to study and understand how information seekers search through documents such that they can assess their relevance. This search and assessment of document relevance, known as document triage, is an important information seeking process, but is not yet well understood. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital library scientists have undertaken a series of user studies involving information seeking, collected a large amount of data describing information seekers' behavior during document search. Next to this, we have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of off-the-shelf visualization tools which can benefit document triage study. Here we set out to utilize existing information visualization techniques and tools in order to gain a better understanding of the large amount of user-study data collected by HCI and digital library researchers. We describe the range of available tools and visualizations we use in order to increase our knowledge of document triage. Treemap, parallel coordinates, stack graph, matrix chart, as well as other visualization methods, prove to be insightful in exploring, analyzing and presenting user behavior during document triage. Our findings and visualizations are evaluated by HCI and digital library researchers studying this proble

Creating and reading realistic electronic books

A digital library project aims to combine the look and feel of physical books with the advantages of online documents such as hyperlinks and multimedia. A lightweight open source implementation enables highly responsive page turning and works within standard Web browsers