4 ms·

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 thi

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.
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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]