White spaces

[enne_son]

Hrant, the periodicity, moving horizontally across the word or lines of text, that Bill is referring to in his post above, is what I have been calling ‘narrow phase alignment.’ Perfect phase alignment is like a grating, and gives rise to a picket-fence effect in type. In a sense, the periodicity is an illusion, but the narrow phase alignment around a periodic mean is a fact, documentable with Fourier Transforms.

I think of narrow phase alignment as relating to the black.

The whites to me are a bit of a different story. I think good notan requires that the whites inside and between letters are all “in synch.” What that means specifically in terms of individual letters is difficult to describe, because, for example the o and the bowls of d / p / q / b have a circular expressedness, while n / h / u have a predominantly oblong or rectangular expressedness, and the a / e / s / z have a distrubed expressedness. So there must be a deviation from perfect equivalence to approximate a kind of optical cohesion.

The narrow phase alignment in the blacks and the optical cohesion in the whites hold the word together in gestalt terms as an internally well-composed visual unit.

You might insist there is no rhythm in text face design, but if you deny that the narrow phase alignment exists you are just wrong, and if you deny that it is important for easy word-recognition, you are telling me you are out of touch with what happens in the visual cortex during a fixation. In reading alphanumerical symbols, the visual system uses spatially frequency channels tuned to statistical regularities in the stimulus.

This has yet to be shown empirically, but I think it will eventually become evident to researchers looking at reading, that both the narrow phase alignment of the blacks and the rhythmic cohesion of the whites are critical for the rapid automatic visual word-form resolution that underlies reading.

[hrant]

What kills this whole thing is that there is no pattern in saccade length, because the content determines that.

There is a rhythm in reading consecutive lines (because lines don't vary in length, within a composition) but that's beyond the spectrum of letterforms.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

…there is no pattern in saccade length…

That doesn’t matter, because one takes measurements not from how far the muscles of the orbit move, but on the surface of the retina, in units of rod.

[hrant]

No matter where you measure it, there's no pattern of flow (AKA rhythm) at the letterform level.

hhp

[Maxim Zhukov]

I love this quote:

[Richard Fink]

To follow up on 5star's Debussy quotation - something more recent:

Writing With Miles Davis.

Does it apply to type? Of course.

[hrant]

Musical composition is display type; text type is the sound of the forest.

hhp

[William Berkson]

Nothing 'kills this whole thing' because what Peter wrote about narrow phase alignment is just true. The eye can only see about 8 letters clearly at text sizes, and over that range you do have the periodicity. It is very clear to me that the brain throws some kind of matrix over the text to interpret it. You can see this from the difficulty of reading mixed upright and italic text. If you 'accordion' type it is also much harder to read.

[hrant]

No, only 3-4 letters (although ignoring the parafovea is ignoring reading). Still, there is no flow, so there is no rhythm. If you're talking about pattern, please use "pattern"; the term "rhythm" reinforces the Chirography Myth, a romantic illusion. That's my only point [here].

hhp

[rs_donsata]

"What kills this whole thing is that there is no pattern in saccade length, because the content determines that."

Yes, but in order for your eyes to make effective saccade jumps it has to figure out the rythm of the text and predict the location of the next relevant chunk of information based on it.

[enne_son]

Saccadic landing sites are guided by the information provided in parafoveal preview as well as the syntactic status and semantic content of what has been found in prior fixational events. In parafoveal preview, the alteration of the larger word spaces with the smaller rhythmically linked inter-letter and intra-letter spaces plays a facilitory role.

[hrant]

Fixation points are determined based on content. What kind of content has rhythm?

Content doesn't even have pattern. If it did so would saccades; but they don't.

hhp

[hrant]

This alternation has no pattern, hence no rhythm.

Don't get me wrong, I do realize that some fonts do try to enforce rhythm. But that makes them inferior because -just like chirography- it's an arbitrary constraint.

hhp

[William Berkson]

Hrant, according to this, the sharp vision is 4-5 letters, since there is a smooth, though steep, curve of fall-off in acuity, I was including a flanking character or two adding 7-8 characters total identifiable characters. But it is indeed small. I don't think the parafovea can give you content, but only relative word length, as Peter notes. This is, however an important clue, at least in English.

Yes, the periodicity is not strictly speaking rhythm, because the horizontal axis is not time, but distance. However, the pictures are otherwise the same, so using the term rhythm is not misleading, so long as you understand that reading is by saccades and parallel processing.

The question of whether than hand in motion has anything to do with good or bad type design is totally another question. In fact, I think type, with its repetition of identical characters, forced a greater care with uniformity of periodicity, and a resulting higher readability of type vs handwriting.

So I and almost everyone else will, I think, ignore the Hrant language police and still use 'rhythm' to refer to the very important issue of periodicity in type design.

[hrant]

Over, and over, and over, again...

If the parafovea didn't deliver content, saccades could never be 15+ letters long. And no, those are not always followed by regressions.

the periodicity is not strictly speaking rhythm

When -as you say- it's distance and not time, it's not rhythm at all, it's just pattern.

It's not police work, it's teaching. But anybody can appease their succubi -and father figures- any way they like.

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

[hrant]

Commodore lives.

hhp

[enne_son]

Pursuing narrow phase alignment is a functional constraint.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

hmmm, or the Timex Sinclair..

[William Berkson]

Hrant, according to this—same wikipedia link as above, the average saccade is 7-9 characters, though it can be up to 20. This average is consistent with the parafovea not delivering much semantic information to the brain.

The issues here are the same whether you call it periodicity or rhythm. Getting the character widths and sidebearings to have the verticals hit around the regular 'frequency' of half the n is important.

I don't have any father figures in type, unless it was my late Uncle Ben Lieberman, or William Caslon. Neither never opined on these issues that I know of.

[hrant]

This average is consistent with the parafovea not delivering much semantic information to the brain.

What is this, a presidential debate spin room? Excuse me, but what kind of peon is going to fall for that sort of contrived logic? "The average length of a human stride is 2.6 feet, therefore humans never have a good reason to jump".

Getting the character widths and sidebearings to have the verticals hit around the regular 'frequency' of half the n is important.

Disagree.

Timex Sinclair

Which came five years after my first computer, the Commodore PET.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PET_2001_Series-IMG_1724.JPG

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Really? I guess I was only really aware of the 64.

[enne_son]

By the way, I think it is plausible that robust deep-parafoveal predictions about word-identity are selectively made on the basis of semantic context and lexical expectation, relative to the new ensemble of summary statistics encountered in a specific parafoveal preview event. But in these cases accurate sense following requires confirmation and confirmation requires fixation on the word, rather than skipping. If efficient processing of the blacks and whites in parallel is the issue here, the relevance of phase alignment in the blacks, and rhythmic cohesion in the whites is again key)

The frequency of this depend on the “given” versus “new” (to the text – not the reader) status of the words in the text at hand.

Providing informative summary statistics (hpp: boumas) is a design challenge here, and the relationship of providing informative summary statistics to meeting the constraints governing efficient processing during a fixation is what needs investigation. Probably there are countervailing pressures here and the solution is a balancing act.

[enne_son]

re: the parafovea / [not] delivering much semantic information to the brain.

The parafovea delivers visual information to the visual cortex. The deeper you go into the parafovea, that coarser the resolution capabilities of the parafovea are. Critical details of the role-unit components of letter forms (bowl / stem / counter) get lost or scrambled. Beyond a certain point, and up to about 15 character spaces, only “ensemble statistics” or “summary statistics”, that are sufficient for the guidance of eye movements, but insufficient for unambiguous word-recognition are available. Still, in the near parafovea the resolution capabilities are often sufficient for the visual system to predict and confirm correctly the identity of short contextually expected words like ‘the’ and ‘in’ and ‘at’ without having to attend to them specifically. Except in [to clarify: with the exception of] these cases, fixational attention is required for identification to occur. Also, in the near parafoveal, just beyond the reach of foveal vision, there can be what is called “eccentric enhancement” of what strictly speaking falls in the near parafovea just outside the actual fovea. This has the effect of enlarging the “uncrowded span” to the point where 5 to 8 letter words are fully accessible in a single fixation to parallel processing.

[enne_son]

I think my description is more informative about what happens in reading, and provides a richer, more accurate description of what kinds of reading-side constraints and challenges the type-designer and typographer work under.