Font size and style does matter

An interesting report from from Tracy A. Gill of Target Marketing Magazine on a book by Colin Wheildon makes the following points about how some fonts are easier to read than others:

1) 67% of people have good comprehension with serif font, compared to 65% who rated their comprehesion when reading sans-serif font as poor.

2) When comparing Times New Roman standard versus bold, the results showed that the stndard Roman font showed 70% good comprehesion, compared to 30% for the Bold font. And 50% of readers rated their comprehension of bold font as poor.

Notes:
Sans-serif - is without the little 'feet' on the letters. Arial (like this) is a sans-serif font.
Serif font - Times New Roman (like this) is a serif font

Bold is like this
Standard (Roman) is like this

Lesson -
Serif fonts are generally easier on the eye than sans-serif, and using too much bold can make the text harder to read.

However -
I recall earlier research that said for online/computer reading, a sans-serif font is easier to read than a font with serifs. That still seems to work for me. Sans-serif fonts are much more common on web sites (Arial and Verdana in particular).