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4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see... I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having own personal email address. My p
by lproven 1mo ago
4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see...
I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having
own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it,
and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st
I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under
Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the
time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not
use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk
couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped.
If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this
is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At
the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if
you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter
words on the fly.
- lproven 1mo agoHeh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like this. :-) In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2 letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones to choose from.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- jagged-chisel 1mo agoNo, please. It doesn’t wrap correctly on narrow mobile screens.
- thavalai 1mo agoIt seems to wrap correctly in landscape mode.
- Xirdus 1mo agoNewspapers figured out wide text lines are awful for reading some 100 years ago. We're still waiting for web designers to catch up...
- RugnirViking 1mo agoWhy are novels laid out the way they are? It's almost as though its not as simple as "bad for reading" but rather a feature of the content. imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan. If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings
- pc86 1mo agoAre a lot of novels laid out with 24-30" lines of text?
- Xirdus 1mo agoVideo games are routinely stomping over all known rules of good user interface in the name of art. And that's okay because it's a leisure activity, and efficiency and comfort is not the goal. I suspect the same thing is true of novels - making the text physically easier to read wouldn't make the story emotionally easier to enjoy, so they intentionally choose a suboptimal text layout for aesthetic reasons. The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.
- NuclearPM 1mo agoStarting sentences with “It's almost as though/if” is very annoying.
- stellamariesays 1mo ago[flagged]
- marcianx 1mo agoThe passage has a couple commas where it shouldn't and doesn't have some commas where it should just for justification. So it's trading one type of particularity for another, and I favor grammar more. :)