In typography, an ascender is the portion of a minuscule letter in a Latin-derived alphabet that extends above the mean line of a font. That is, the part of a lower-case letter that is taller than the font's x-height.
Ascenders, together with descenders, increase the recognizability of words. For this reason, British road signs no longer use all capital letters.[1]
Studies made at the start of the construction of the British motorway network concluded that mixed-case letters were much easier to read than "all-caps" and a special font was designed for motorway signs, these then became universal across the UK. See Road signs in the United Kingdom.
References
- ^ Sampson, Geoffrey. Writing Systems: A linguistic introduction, pp. 94–95. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-8047-1254-9.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
