Timeline for Why do aircraft cockpit displays use uppercase fonts?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 14, 2019 at 17:25 | comment | added | Carey Gregory | With no supporting evidence I simply don't believe this claim. | |
| Dec 13, 2019 at 1:53 | comment | added | Zeus | @leftaroundabout (et al), I'd guess the difference is not so much the length, but rather the fact that place names (etc) you actually need to read (they are probably unfamiliar), whereas all-caps signs you just recognise. This latter is more applicable to the cockpit environment, where you generally know all the labels already. Also, many of the cocpit labels are (or contain) numbers, and so should be consistent in size with letters. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 22:43 | comment | added | John K | Whatever. I'm just telling you why it's done in cockpits, having worked in the industry a long time. Perhaps OEMs will start to change it. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 22:26 | comment | added | Harper - Reinstate Monica | Actually, the Clearview people did the research and found that's wrong. Mixed case with an appropriate font is correct. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 19:20 | comment | added | John K | You aren't reading labels for switches or titles in displays like a sentence. It's a label. It needs to stand out and be readable at a glance, from several feet away, and for a title of something the "word shape" doesn't really help you. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 19:08 | comment | added | JustWilliam | I've read, (I don't have a reference) that mixed case is easier to read quickly, so I'm dubious about this answer. All uppercase might just be a legacy from 1960s - 1980s military avionics which are slow to change. My point is, military supplier when making products for civil use would use what they were familiar with. Remember all those screens in the cockpit need device drivers -- it's a very different kettle of fish from writing to a pc screen. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 18:39 | comment | added | Notts90 | This answer really needs something to back it up. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 17:26 | comment | added | alephzero | @Muzer "all UK road signs are in mixed case" is completely WRONG. In fact almost all MANDATORY signs are in upper case. Mixed case is reserved for additional information. See highwaycodeuk.co.uk/uploads/3/2/9/2/3292309/… for many examples. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 13:47 | comment | added | MJeffryes | @Dai Use of mixed case in the UK predates the Vienna convention. It was introduced with the motorways in the 50s, and was based on German and American research on readability. See here | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 12:02 | comment | added | Muzer | @leftaroundabout good point, I didn't think of that. It's certainly nowhere near all road signs - a lot of them, though. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 11:54 | comment | added | Dai | @StianYttervik I think that might be because of the Vienna Convention on Road Signage. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 11:45 | comment | added | leftaroundabout | @Muzer yeah, STOP and SLOW as well are examples where UK signs do use all-caps. I think the point is, single short words are better readable in caps, whereas place names are often long enough for the “shape” aspect to help, like it does in sentences. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 11:33 | comment | added | Stian | @Muzer Really? UK stop signs spell "Stop" not "STOP" ? | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 11:14 | comment | added | Dai | @Muzer Right - that's because the human brain can "read" text by looking only at the outline shape of the word instead of the letters - but this doesn't work if the text is all-uppercase (because then all words of the same length have roughly the same shape). I wonder if the all-uppercase trend started off as a hunch in the 1950s or so and by the time that solid research suggested mixed-case was better than all-uppercase there was too much institutional inertia to change? (I wonder if it could be because in WW2 almost all military stencil prints were all uppercase for simplicity...?) | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 9:51 | comment | added | Muzer | Do you know of some research that backs this up? In the UK all road signs are in mixed case specifically for the readability reason, and they generally (obviously there are exceptions) aren't words strung together into sentences, but things like place names etc. | |
| Dec 12, 2019 at 1:11 | history | answered | John K | CC BY-SA 4.0 |