5 ms·
> There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text. That reason is called format not readability, tho
by qayxc 6y ago
> There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text.
That reason is called format not readability, though.
Newspapers (if you still remember these) go way beyond this limit and are still readable.
- DanBC 6y agoDon't newspapers use columns, and thus go way below this limit?
- Veen 6y agoThey go beyond the limit by displaying text in columns. Imagine how difficult it would be to read a broadsheet newspaper if the text ran from one edge of the page to the other. As lines get longer, it is increasingly difficult to find the starting point of the next line and reading speed and comprehension are reduced. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071581901904586 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10715...
- qayxc 6y agoJust for shits and giggles I grabbed a random book from the shelf and counted characters per column. The book I grabbed was "Spoken Language Processing", Huang Acero, Hon (ISBN 0-13-022616-5) and I counted 88 characters per line. The book is still very readable, despite exceeding the claimed 70-odd character limit for books/columns. Another book sitting next to it (a numerical mathematics textbook) had 82 characters per line. Granted, the limit of no more than 70 characters per line applies if whitespace and punctuation aren't counted, but that's never done with hard limits in digital documents either, so...
- SamBam 6y agoAs others say, it's the opposite. Newspapers and magazines usually have a character limit of well under 80 characters per row of text. Every so often I open a magazine that doesn't abide by this, and has text that spans across the whole page, and they're nearly unreadable.