bouma shape
n.— «In visual terms, a word is distinguished by its characters’ relation to the white space surrounding it and the nature of its letter face (for instance, small thin strokes are common to handwriting, and thick short strokes are common to non-serifed print fonts). Psychologists describe this as its “Bouma-shape” (after Dutch psychologist Herman Bouma) in cognition studies.» —“Optical Character Recognition” by Steven Killings Connect: Information Technology at NYU (New York City) Feb. 12, 1999. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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