🚀 go-pugleaf

Is anyone aware of any type of statistics used to compare different
fonts ?  For example, if I format a document using the Times family
(I use ditroff with Adobe's TranScript, but that shouldn't matter)
and then format it again using the Palatino family, the Palatino
document requires more pages since the font is "bigger".  If I look
at the font metrics file, for example, comparing Times, Palatino
and New Century for a few typical characters I get

	character	Times		Palatino	New Century
	---------	-----		--------	-----------
	0 (zero)	 100		   100		    111
	A		 144		   156		    144
	E		 122		   122		    144
	d		 100		   122		    115

From this, the characters in both Palatino and New Century are "wider"
than in the Times family.  Visually I find the characters in the
Palatino and New Century fonts bigger also.

I would guess someone could take the character occurrence frequencies
and a font metrics file and come up with a number for each font that
would give you some idea as to the size of the font.

A related question is whether anyone has come up with any statistics
to quantitatively measure the "readability" of different fonts
(as subjective a concept as this might be) ??

	Richard Stevens
	Health Systems International, New Haven, CT
	   stevens@hsi.com
           ... { uunet | yale } ! hsi ! stevens