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by ComputerGuru 2003 days ago
It’s actually been proved to be the opposite... which is probably why a lot of legalese you aren’t meant to read but they’re required to provide is written in small print upper case.

This has to do with the outline of letters in uppercase being indistinct (if you trace an outline - especially with serif fonts - you’ll largely just get a block) so you need to spend more time per-letter to distinguish the characters whereas with lowercase, the “fitted box” shape is shared between fewer letters: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269890...

2 comments

I am not claiming that upper-case is more readable in general. I know the practice to write SQL keywords in upper-case and I find it more readable. From https://stackoverflow.com/a/608201/7714279 "You can easily separate the keywords from table and column names, etc." However, it's a choice. Some people rely for code highlighting but this gets messy if we write SQL code inside Python code. This is especially where this library comes to lend a hand
While I agree that uppercase is hard to read, turns out there is a good reason for caps in legal docs:

"Under US law, disclaimers must be 'conspicuous'" https://law.stackexchange.com/a/18210

I don’t think size 8 in light grey in the footer is conspicuous, uppercase or otherwise.