Renegade — Thu, 19 Dec 2002 09:01:25 +0000

almost close enough to a typography lesson ... boring ... lol

http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/wonk4/emphasis.html

Megan — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 14:15:49 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Roo
40 to 50 charecters...hmmmmm....now that's interesting! Should that include spaces too I wonder?

I'm pretty sure that doesn't include spaces. You can try this out in your word processor if you want - MS Word, at least, will give character count (with & without spaces) in the word count window.

Renegade — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 10:31:22 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Roo
Gosh I'd love to take a Typography class!

no you wouldn't, they are sooooo boring

Roo — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 06:57:34 +0000

40 to 50 charecters...hmmmmm....now that's interesting! Should that include spaces too I wonder?

I don't mind the smaller text anymore, but I think I'll start paying attention to what my eyes do, and what they want to do when looking at text lines that are much longer than that.

Gosh I'd love to take a Typography class!

Suzanne — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 17:09:28 +0000

There you go. It's all of the above, lol...

pmj7 — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:53:09 +0000

Well then I'm not too far off, at least line-length wise! At 640x480 res, SNW has about 40 chars in the center and right columns (with the Explorer-only menu hide feature on). At 1024x768 it has about 70 chars in the center, and still 40 in the right.

Peter

Megan — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:19:45 +0000

I have this somewhere because I wrote an article on text formatting... let me see... 50-70 characters is what I have.

Suzanne — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 15:58:31 +0000

Good point! I forget the ratios, though -- do you remember them?

I seem to recall a line-length of 65 characters, regardless of font-size for optimal readability? Or was that 40? Or four inches. Shoot.

Megan — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 15:49:09 +0000

Ratios between line length and font size are also important. Graphic designers have specific numbers in mind for this - but in general small font sizes should have shorter line lengths while larger text should have longer line lengths.

Suzanne — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 14:53:34 +0000

I've been saying this for years, you'll probably remember my rants on this at WPTS, Peter -- anything smaller than the font size in your address bar is too small for reading on a website.

Slightly smaller than that is fine for fine print, such as copyright notices, address at the bottom of the page, et cetera.

Navigation and text-based content should be that size or BIGGER.

Comprehension plummets when text is too large or too small to read. Legibility is not the issue, readability is. You shouldn't have to concentrate to read (when you're a fluent reader). Microtext forces people to take each word one at a time, much like ALL CAPS WORDS DO.