[crispinb]

> which are strongly linked to habit and consensus

And hence influenced by culture. Much of typography (the aesthetic appeal aspect) is very clearly culture-bound.

But even the one aspect which might seem to be universal/objective (different things but that's another story), ie. legibility, turns out IIRC to be highly variable. I don't have the references, but I'm pretty sure recent research has shown legibility to be generational. The advantages of serifs has dropped off as later generations have been more exposed to sans serif typefaces. And gothic typefaces were more legible to pre-WWII Germans, etc.

If that's right, the best one could do mathematically would be to model a snapshot of the current cultural state. Perhaps the model could have parameters that could be tweaked as culture changed.