In reply to White spaces:
[Hrant] “It's easier to tell apart "help" & "holy" than "and" & "mad" deeper into the parafovea.”
That may well be, but I think there is quite a bit of work done by Gordon Legge and colleagues that shows that when foveal vision deteriorates to the point that is is largely disabled, and a person must use parafoveal vision to read, reading is slower, becomes laborious, far less automatic, and the visual span becomes reduced in size to fewer characters being processed at one time.
