14 ms·

This presentation encourages a relatively large line-height and the presentation claims (without citation) that it makes paragraphs easier to read. Intuitively,

by halo 18y ago

This presentation encourages a relatively large line-height and the presentation claims (without citation) that it makes paragraphs easier to read. Intuitively, this does not make any sense to me - the larger the leading then logically the more difficult it is for the eye to find the start of the next line. I personally find sites with a large amount of leading between them difficult to read, and think many design sites overdo it - including Jeff Croft's own site and the cited A List Apart where the lines are so far apart I seriously struggle to read it. Edit: Another criticism of this presentation is that it implies Internet Explorer doesn't support @font-face, which is does - in fact, it invented the property which was later standardised in CSS2. The difference is that while other browsers generally support TTF, OpenType or both, Internet Explorer 5-7 only accepts the proprietary Embedded OpenType but a free converter from TTF is available. It also misses one big negative of using sIFR - Flash renders fonts differently from the rest of the page (possibly due to Flash using odd aliasing) making it look weird and 'stand out' compared to the rest of the site - I have no idea why he author is so quick to embrace something that looks so distinctively out of place when trying to encourage coherent design.

randomwalker 18y ago
Strange. That has not been my experience at all. Text with small leading is very hard for me to read, whereas A List Apart is very, very pleasant. The first thing I do with my stylesheets is to increase the line height to 1.4 or 1.5 for all text. Your claim that it is logically harder for the eye to find the start of the next line is easily refuted. Think of the extreme case: each line is half a page apart. Clearly, the eye has no problem finding the next line. I'd like to hear other people's opinions too.
- halo 18y ago
  >Think of the extreme case: each line is half a page apart. Clearly, the eye has no problem finding the next line. I don't see how that's a refutation at all - if anything I think it supports my case. If each line is half-a-page apart, when you reach the end of the line you have to look down to find the start of the next one because you can't see where the next line is within your natural eye-line, preventing the sentence from flowing naturally. Whatsmore, people have no problems reading books or magazines which almost always have a relatively narrower leading than sites like A List Apart. I think the middle-ground is optimum for readability - if it's too narrow it's easy to mix up which line you're reading, if it's too wide it's difficult for the eye to find the next line so reading doesn't flow naturally. I can't help but conclude that someone read "leading is good" somewhere and took it to its logical conclusion which is making it excessive and this meme has caught on, much like how Fitts's Law has been abused as an excuse to make things unnecessarily and annoyingly big for little gain.
- briansmith 18y ago
  Line spacing needs to be done in proportion to the page width. As you increase the line length, the line spacing must gradually increase. For a typical web page, line spacing as large as 1.4 or 1.5 does more harm than good. First of all, it doesn't do any good (see http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2006/05/17/600507.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2006/05/17/600507.asp...). Secondly, it makes the user scroll more to read the content. Scrolling is way worse for readability than tight line spacing. A lot of people use Verdana, and Verdana is a very legible typeface. But, because it is so open, and because of its enormous x-height, it tends to look wrong without excessive line spacing. Also, its normal weight is basically semi-bold at small sizes on LCD screens with Cleartype enabled, and that also encourages excessive line height. I've not seen any evidence that says that these huge line heights actually improve reading performance; the primary benefit of huge line spacing is an improvement in the "color" of the page when using Verdana. Microsoft's new Cleartype font collection (the C* fonts) are slightly less open, don't have such an enormous x-height, and are less bold at small sizes. Consequently, a line height of 1.2 or 1.25 is plenty when with less than 75 characters per line.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
tel 18y ago
The line height issue comes, somewhat, from the argument about textual color. If you have no leading at all, the text ends up very cramped and dark which is considered very unfavorable. For instance, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to find many books printed professionally which don't have at least half a line of leading. How leading affects someone's ability to scan lines, I don't know so much about. In my experience, medium text color is more pleasing to read in general -- I feel less eye strain, less cramped -- but I don't experience much difficulty following lines regardless of leading.

by halo 18y ago

randomwalker 18y ago

Strange. That has not been my experience at all. Text with small leading is very hard for me to read, whereas A List Apart is very, very pleasant. The first thing I do with my stylesheets is to increase the line height to 1.4 or 1.5 for all text. Your claim that it is logically harder for the eye to find the start of the next line is easily refuted. Think of the extreme case: each line is half a page apart. Clearly, the eye has no problem finding the next line. I'd like to hear other people's opinions too.

halo 18y ago
>Think of the extreme case: each line is half a page apart. Clearly, the eye has no problem finding the next line. I don't see how that's a refutation at all - if anything I think it supports my case. If each line is half-a-page apart, when you reach the end of the line you have to look down to find the start of the next one because you can't see where the next line is within your natural eye-line, preventing the sentence from flowing naturally. Whatsmore, people have no problems reading books or magazines which almost always have a relatively narrower leading than sites like A List Apart. I think the middle-ground is optimum for readability - if it's too narrow it's easy to mix up which line you're reading, if it's too wide it's difficult for the eye to find the next line so reading doesn't flow naturally. I can't help but conclude that someone read "leading is good" somewhere and took it to its logical conclusion which is making it excessive and this meme has caught on, much like how Fitts's Law has been abused as an excuse to make things unnecessarily and annoyingly big for little gain.
briansmith 18y ago
Line spacing needs to be done in proportion to the page width. As you increase the line length, the line spacing must gradually increase. For a typical web page, line spacing as large as 1.4 or 1.5 does more harm than good. First of all, it doesn't do any good (see http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2006/05/17/600507.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/archive/2006/05/17/600507.asp...). Secondly, it makes the user scroll more to read the content. Scrolling is way worse for readability than tight line spacing. A lot of people use Verdana, and Verdana is a very legible typeface. But, because it is so open, and because of its enormous x-height, it tends to look wrong without excessive line spacing. Also, its normal weight is basically semi-bold at small sizes on LCD screens with Cleartype enabled, and that also encourages excessive line height. I've not seen any evidence that says that these huge line heights actually improve reading performance; the primary benefit of huge line spacing is an improvement in the "color" of the page when using Verdana. Microsoft's new Cleartype font collection (the C* fonts) are slightly less open, don't have such an enormous x-height, and are less bold at small sizes. Consequently, a line height of 1.2 or 1.25 is plenty when with less than 75 characters per line.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

tel 18y ago

The line height issue comes, somewhat, from the argument about textual color. If you have no leading at all, the text ends up very cramped and dark which is considered very unfavorable. For instance, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to find many books printed professionally which don't have at least half a line of leading. How leading affects someone's ability to scan lines, I don't know so much about. In my experience, medium text color is more pleasing to read in general -- I feel less eye strain, less cramped -- but I don't experience much difficulty following lines regardless of leading.