🚀 go-pugleaf

Olav,  

As typography was my major subject I would consider my self well-informed. And I do agree with you that readability is important. Like yourself I often find my self ranking it as the most important factor in the design equation. What I'm saying is that glyph scaling may sometimes be the lesser of  evils.  

But than again, I'm saying this from another point of view: Typesetting in other languages than English means that you have to take a number of considerations into account that you won't have to in English, for example umlauts, diacritical signs etc. which effects leading etc and, more importantly, much, much longer words. Due to the nature of all the german and scandinavian languages we combine shorter word into longer ones - which causes hyphenation to occur much more often. If you use glyph scaling, even very moderately, the number of hyphenations, rivers etc, in your text will drop considerably.  

While it is sometimes possible to change your design to avoid this kind of cheating, people working on magazines and newspapers most often can not. do that. They  are paid to get a certain number of pages out the door each hour, If they think that glyph scaling will help them to improve the OVERALL readability of the text in the time they have at their disposal - than I'm more than happy to inform them about that possibility for a trade-off. 

I agree that a scientific study on glyph scaling would be interesting. Meahwhile I have to get by with the opinion I have from my customers. I would consider it bad business practice to deem them as ignorants *g* 

Sincerly yours 

/ Richard