Save Money, Stop Capitalizing

CORRECTION, NOV 28, 2003 — Our fact checking department must have been out to lunch. The following story is inaccurate. The administrator’s suggestion was not to cease capitalization, but to use a smaller point size. The change was rejected because the politicians couldn’t read the smaller text. Thanks to Rasmus Bruun for calling our attention to the error.

A Swedish administrator instituted a lowercase-only rule for all county documents, which she claimed would save the county 10% on paper costs. The decision was overturned after the county received complaints that the text was not legible.

Other than the absurd idea that cutting caps saves much space, I am intrigued that it was so quickly rejected. I’ve wondered what would happen if all-lowercase text, which is used quite effectively by a near majority of internet chatters, was instituted among a broader public. I believe this story is a case of what Emigre coined as we read best what we read most and Hrant acronymized as WRBWWRM. There is little proof that capitalization, which is largely based on subjective cultural and traditional grammar rules, improves the innate readability of text. Is there?

Bradbury Thompson didn’t think so. But his unicase experiment doesn’t benefit from the word shapes created by ascenders and descenders. An all-lowercase system does.

Thanks to Kemie Guaida for alerting me to this story. If I got off my butt and learned Swedish I would have already read this in our local news. Discuss at Typophile.