I was looking at an ESV Bible the other day, and was very surprised to see that the footnotes were set in Myriad Tilt, at about 6pt.

Although the stems in all the letters are highly tapered so that the letters appear a little skewy, when reading from a normal distance this was not very visible in the footnote text. More the opposite, in fact: the footnotes stood out for their clarity and ease of reading, even when compared to the larger body text (IIRC it was Berkeley Old Style).

I suppose that the stem tapering in MT was done so that it emphasised the most distinctive and visually obvious parts of the letters. Has anyone experimented with deforming a font for very small sizes to improve readability (not counting hinting--I'm talking paper here)?