3 ms·
Okay, would like to read it. However, on my screen, called 14", about 12.5" wide, the text is about 100 characters per line in about 7.5" for about 13.33 char
by graycat 12y ago
Okay, would like to read it.
However, on my screen, called 14",
about 12.5" wide,
the text is about 100 characters
per line in about 7.5" for about
13.33 characters per inch horizontally.
Then with two pair of strong reading glasses
and my nose 5" from the screen, I can
barely read the text.
A shame because about half the width of the
screen is given over to just a table of
contents with mostly blank space.
Maybe if I had a video screen 4 feet wide?
More generally, yes, I know, there is a lot
of careful, sophisticated, deep work in
user interface, but for the OP pages
I'd like to see only about 60
characters per line and about
6 characters per inch horizontally.
About 8 characters per inch is
my upper limit.
Sure if my screen were twice as wide, then
I could get the present 13 characters
per inch down to 7.5, but these days
with laptops and tables, screens 25"
inches wide are not near the 'median'.
13 characters per inch I just can't read
without a lot of effort.
Generally, in Web screens, we are free to use
about all the length we want but should
be very careful about using up screen
width.
In my start-up, each screen is just
800 pixels wide with high contrast and
large fonts, about 25 pixels high on
lines 35 pixels high.
Here I'd like to encourage Web page
designers to use larger fonts, narrower
pages, and fewer characters per line.
- xxxyy 12y agoCan't you just Ctrl+ it?
- cbd1984 12y ago> larger fonts, narrower pages, and fewer characters per line. And I prefer the exact opposite, and neither of us are wrong. I just thought I'd get that out of the way before the usual flame war erupts, and the "your preference is objectively bad" brigade comes out citing "laws" and "studies" and "You must be just like the small group we tested on, you just don't know what you like" and so on.
- trurl42 12y agoThe page is unusable at lower resolutions. http://i.snag.gy/O9Abg.jpg http://i.snag.gy/O9Abg.jpg It's pretty bad.
- cbd1984 12y agoAh, the sign of a graphical designer: "No. It doesn't wrap or flow. Wrapping and flowing messes up the design I created. Everything should be pixel-perfect with how it is on my Mac."
- ineedtosleep 12y ago> I just thought I'd get that out of the way before the usual flame war erupts, Then you post an ad-hominem and ignore any evidence that this site breaks the web. Bravo.
- graycat 12y ago> And I prefer the exact opposite Fine with me, but here I'm not trying for anything subtle or artistic: I just want to be able to read the darned text. My suggestion of <= 60 characters per line is closer to what newspapers long preferred. My suggestion of only about 6 characters per inch horizontally on the screen is due partly to my eyes no longer being 20 years old, but really tiny fonts get fuzzy on a screen 12.5" wide with 1024 x 768 pixels. I'd be glad to have any other situation, including the one you prefer, if I could just read the darned text. I confess, I just tweaked my favorite text editor to give me 62 characters, bold, in 9" horizontally, and I like it much better than before. So, that's 6.88 characters per inch horizontally on the screen, can clearly see the difference between a comma and a period, etc. For some Web pages, I just copy the text to the system clipboard, pull it into my favorite text editor, re-flow the text back to about 60 characters per line, and just read the stuff easily. But for this piece on quantum mechanics, I guessed that there would be enough in math notation that my copy, paste, and re-flow into my 8 bit ASCII text editor wouldn't work. I'd enjoy reading the quantum mechanics if I could read the text.