People miss planes, burn dinner, and stay up way past bedtime just to read one more page of a good book. But it"s not just the quality of the prose that causes the worm to burrow so deeply into a book. As typographers have long known, the aesthetics of print has a lot to do with keeping the eye on the page. Since Gutenberg put together the first printing press with movable type more than 500 years ago, typesetters have agonized over the optimum point size of the letters, whether they should have those curlicues(花线)on the ends called serifs(衬线), what style of font to choose, and the precise amount of white space needed between lines of text to make the words stand out. Printing got so good that readers fond it easier to immerse themselves in a book. But with the advent of the computer, reading became infinitely more difficult. The biggest problem was resolution—the clarity of words and images on the screen. A big stumbling block in computer evolution was fuzzy letters arranged on glaring screens that left the reader with a blinding headache. Readability is so poor that, according to Microsoft, the average reader hits the print button after just three paragraphs. As the rest of the world fiddled with new technologies that would provide higher resolution, Microsoft was working on new fonts that would make it easier for the eye to focus on a computer screen. But Bill Hill, a Scot hired in 1994 to head Microsoft"s typography section, wanted to know what was going on in readers" brains when reading a book. He was convinced people would switch from printed page to screen if he could duplicate the experience. "The magical thing about the book is it disappears when you read it. You"re not even aware of the book because the real book is going on in your head. How does it do it" Hill says on the Microsoft Web site.