Poster Font Size

Just a quick question, what is the smallest font i can use that is still readable and clear to the users? Also what is the best and readable font style to use.


Thanks

There's too many variables to answer that simply.
Try making a bunch of examples, then go to the Beta Grid and upload the textures and see.
(the beta grid uses 'play Lindens', so it won't cost you anything to try them out.)
Once you find the combination of Font, Size, color, Resolution, and Prim Size,
then just write it down and reproduce it on the real grid.

I would imagine that can not be truly answered unless you set a series of minimum requirements first, such as having the viewer set at specific resolution and uploading your text at certain size that would maintaine optimal viewing at any size prim it is applied to. I am sure the text can be quite tiny since avi's are able to zoom in on objects pretty close.

It depends on the size of your sign. But the bigger the sign, the bigger you'll want your original texture, and thus the fontsize to be, otherwise fonts just get blurry, and require the reader to read from a very specific distance. But bigger textures take longer to load, especially if there are other resourcehogs in the neighbourhood.
But I found a 300*200 image as a texture is still quite acceptable for a 1.5*1 mtr sign. If things look sharp on the original image, then they should still look acceptable on the sign. I'm sure you can work out some good ratios yourself with this

I agree with the replies so far, but will add this: Make your texture a minimum of 512X512 resolution. Anything lower makes text unreadable. I have found that san serifs are more readable and I favor Optima for signage.

It depends a lot on how big it is to be displayed, and how far away the viewer is likely to be. I make most of my vendors have a display that is roughly 2M by 2M. On that size, I have found I can go as small as Arial 8 point on a 512 x 512 image in Photoshop.

I get better results, however, adding the smaller text as Arial 16 point on a 1024 x 1024 image, saving that as a .tga, and then re-sizing the flattened tga file to 512 x 512. This anti-aliases the text better.