> I prefer to read and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to read programs with longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading articles and

> I prefer to read and write software with <80 cpl, and find it difficult to read programs with longer lines. Maybe the difference between reading articles and software is to great to expect the same kind of outcome. Maybe the characters per line is not the relevant data point. The fact that there are so many studies that give wildly varying results using this measure seems to be a strong indicator that this is the case. They chose specific font metrics, and used a single monitor at a single distance in a single context, so they have no way of knowing whether it was the physical width, the pixels per degree, or some other factor that they were actually measuring. Think of it this way: if they had doubled the text size, that would undoubtedly have resulted in far wider line lengths in physical terms, yet the characters per line would have remained the same. If they rigged the conditions so the physical width and characters per line were fixed in lockstep, were they measuring responses to the number of characters per line, or were they really measuring responses to physical width? There's no way of knowing with this study. Any study like this that could usefully be applied to the web needs to take into account varying font sizes and all the other things that make the web different from print. Fixed font sizes in pt is not how the web operates.