- From: Tina Holmboe <tina@greytower.net>
- Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 17:50:21 +0200 (CEST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
On 17 Aug, Patrick Lauke wrote: > length is dramatically sub-optimal (overly long lines of small text, > or a large number of very short lines with only one word or less per > line). This would, I'd imagine (and yes, this is conjecture, I have There are studies - and I can't dig up the references right now either - which state that the "optimal" line length also varies with the type of material; narrow columns are good for newspapers; wider columns for books, and soforth. In addition - as Robert Bringhurst points out in his excellent "The Elements of Typographic Style" - the optimal line length in typography is considered to be 66 characters - for a single-column page set in a serifed text face. For multiple columns, 40-50 are better, 80-90 characters are really no problem for well-set pages, for justified text he recommends 40 (in English texts, that is), less than 38-40 is not recommended, but for small doses of text 12-15 is acceptable. And THEN we complicate it with, for instance, the context. Old Egyptian scribes tended to write very wide columns of text (hypothesized that is because focus was on the *writing*, not the reading) ... The more I learn about the way humans read and the way typography works to aid in that endevaour, the more I agree: leave the line length a variable to be easily adjusted by the user. -- - Tina Holmboe Greytower Technologies tina@greytower.net http://www.greytower.net/ [+46] 0708 557 905
Received on Tuesday, 17 August 2004 15:50:29 UTC