Eye powder
As Augenpulver is known in the typography a particularly small or narrow set and thus hard to read font .
term
Since the eye does not go through letter by letter when reading , but rather groups of words and letters, it can no longer correctly pick up these blocks if the font is too small or narrow. The readability of a font is made more difficult with it.
Such writings can often be found in books or printed matter that are not read continuously, but are only used for looking up purposes and reading key points. Examples are pocket dictionaries or package inserts , since a lot of text has to be accommodated in a small space. Such an "eye powder text" is also more tolerable in these cases than with the normal running texts.
At what point a text is viewed as eye powder is a sometimes very subjective assessment; The legibility of a text depends not only on typographical factors such as font , size and line spacing but also on personal factors such as visual acuity .
The term was already used by Arthur Schopenhauer , who argued with his publisher Brockhaus about a sufficient font size. He also wrote the following quote:
"In the interests of the eyes, the health police should make sure that the smallness of the pressure has an established minimum, which must not be exceeded."
Also ETA Hoffmann used this term already:
"Because in addition to calling the writing a true eye powder, some places were almost completely blurred."
See also
literature
- Hans Peter Willberg : Signpost writing . First aid in dealing with writing. Verlag Hermann Schmidt, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-87439-569-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter J. Biel: The small lexicon of printer language: Old and new technical terms around book printing, typesetting & Co. John Wiley & Sons, 2014, ISBN 978-3-527-68571-4 ( google.de ).
- ^ ETA Hoffmann : The errors in the Gutenberg-DE project