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Jumping back into the thread here, but not particularly directing my response at Andrew's specific post...
Yes, Optima is problematic. People--experts and amateurs--classify it according to their personal lights, as there are no hard and fast rules.
As for all sans serifs having uniform stroke widths, that is patently untrue. The earliest sans serif types I'm aware of were mid-nineteenth American faces classified as grotesques, and they certainly lack serifs and just as certainly have varying stroke thicknesses within most or all characters. Swiss humanist faces (such as Helvetica) show quite a bit of variation, too. Only the Bauhaus faces (the progeny of the Bauhaus school, not the face called Bauhaus) strove for a militantly uniform strokes (roughly Futura through Avant Garde, chronologically).
And, yes, slab serifs, also called Egyptians, are a third distinct category. Scripts are another category, and we could go on with still others, as well as entirely different ways of classifying typefaces.
Going back to the sans serif as text versus serif as text issue, Bruce offered a good summary, but I think he typed "sans serif" where he meant "serif" in a couple of places and vice versa. So try to read it as he meant it and not as he typed it. The context should make it clear. Others have pointed out, when this subject has come up before, that what "feels right" in terms of readability has much to do with what we have become accustomed to reading. So if in the country where you are working you find that most magazines and technical books use a sans serif text face, you might follow that lead. (We're still talking about print, where you have more choices than on the Web.)
Somewhere earlier in this thread somebody trotted out the old chestnut about serifs "guiding the eye" and therefore improving readability. Hogwash! Serifs were developed by stonecutters to give them a way to neatly finish strokes and prevent the radiation of cracks from the ends of strokes. The letterforms developed by Roman stonecutters were imitated by the designers of early Roman types. Serifs have the practical value in letterpress work, analogous to the benefit the stonecutters discovered, of preventing the radiation of ink from the ends of strokes. This is not an issue with modern offset printing and electronic type.
Readability derives not from some general rule about choosing fonts but rather from the way the type is arranged on the page. This is mediated, in turn, by the quality of the software used in composing the type and by the skills and knowledge of the designer (the typographer). These skills and this knowledge do not come easily or quickly. (As I've said before, there are as many young typographers and there are old programmers.) But they can be acquired through diligent study and lots of practice.
Regarding a bibliography, I recommend Pi, by Bruce Rogers. I also like a great many of the Dover reprints, particularly the works by F.W. Goudy. In addition, Adobe has published quite a lot of good material. I think they have discontinued their magazine, but you may be able to find old issues--or perhaps they have archived them on their site. Before there was Adobe Magazine, there was Aldus Magazine.
I also like the American Institute of Graphic Arts publications, such as their Fifty Books of the Year annual exhibit catalog.
Others will no doubt mention several books by Robin Williams, Robert Bringhurst, and others. There is a lot of good material out there. Start _somewhere_.
Dick
"Andrew Broman" <broman -at- acm -dot- org> wrote:
>
>I'm certainly no typography expert, either, but I've done some reading, and
>I've always seen "sans serif" used as a very literal descriptive name. The
>definition that you've given doesn't seem to be completely standard; in
>fact, I've never seen the second requirement (uniform-width strokes) in any
>of the texts I've read on typography. Could you tell me what your source for
>this is?
>
>Alexander Lawson, who is most definitely a typography expert, clearly refers
>to Optima as a sans-serif font in his book _Anatomy of a Typeface_.
>
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