W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > www-style@w3.org > April 2014

[css-text] Characters per line

From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 10:13:00 -0700
Message-ID: <CAAWBYDBCHcAH+b8L-WFBv7C7y06i3tLAyU+eSXu7Eo_7SyEEpQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp>
Cc: "mus@designtoday.co.uk" <mus@designtoday.co.uk>, "CSS WWW Style (www-style@w3.org)" <www-style@w3.org>
[Looks like Koji accidentally appended this to an unrelated thread.
I'm pulling it out, and I've trimmed the text around it to be just
Mustafa's email.]

On Apr 21, 2014, at 12:50 AM, mus@designtoday.co.uk wrote:
> Hello everyone
>
> I was wondering if their was anything in the CSS spec for dealing with
> Characters Per Line. Currently I've made a couple of prototypes using
> JavaScript but this can be a huge performance hit on pages with large
> amounts of text. As CPL is a huge part of read-ability for text and the
> fact we live in a responsive web world maintaining a legible character
> line is almost impossible.
>
> The general rule in typography is the CPL should be between 55-75
> depending on the typeface family and its subsequent fonts. As each font
> has a different character width this can make a huge difference. So the
> idea would be something along the lines like
>
> P {
> cpl: 75;
> }
>
> The effect would be that the paragraph of text would never go beyond this
> amount, dropping to a newline, thus maintaining readability. I thought
> about perhaps a max-cpl or min-cpl but wanted to fire you guys an email
> first to get a feel if this is something that would be reasonable.
Received on Monday, 21 April 2014 17:13:47 UTC

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