The art of font selection.

Recently I am reading the manual of latex-beamer, because I want to use it for presentation. There is a chapter called `Guidelines for Creating Presentations' in beameruserguide.pdf, which is worth reading line by line. Besides guide lines for presentation, it describes cons and pros of various fonts and how to select appropriate ones. There is art in font selection. Well, everyone who has played with linux desktop optimization will agree. But it is still interesting to read the user guide.

For example, in the small caps part, it first states the disadvantage of uppercase text.

Text typeset in small caps is harder to read than normal text. The reason is that we read by seeing the “shape” of words. For example, the word “shape” is mainly recognized by seing one normal letter, one ascending letter, a normal letter, one descending letter, and a normal letter. One has much more trouble spotting a misspelling like “shepe” than “spape”. Small caps destroy the shape of words since shape, shepe and spape all have the same shape, thus making it much harder to tell them apart. Your audience will read small caps more slowly than normal text.

Then it adds

This is, by the way, why legal disclaimers are often written in uppercase letters: not to make them appear more important to you, but to make them much harder to actually read.