Brian M. Curran wrote: > I'm styling my website, and noticed that at my given text size that > the line lengths are too long, because they hurt my eyes. Is there a > rule of thumb for number of characters per line that will yield the > best readability?
There are lots of rules of thumbs... just pick up your authority, and you get some rule, often rather different from other authorities' rules. Good authorities will also say "it really depends" and describe parameters like font face and size, line height, length of words, lack or presence of hyphenation, ragged right vs. justified column, and the overall design of the page (e.g., how many columns) that should be considered. But don't get desperate. On web pages, lines tend to be too short if the author has considered the issue of line length, and much too long in most situations if the hasn't. So just using something fairly sensible, like setting max-width somewhere between 25em and 50em and either not setting width and min-width at all setting them at least to 20em is likely to make your pages better than most pages in this respect. You later mentioned that the site is http://www.draftingservices.com Although the width of the left column is relatively small, it might still be somewhat too large for a couple of reasons. With ragged right and with another column on the right, with little gutter between the columns, the impression is somewhat messy. Adding 1em...2em right padding to the left column would probably help in making the columns appear better. Testing the effects of such padding would be easy (especially using nice tools like on-the-fly editing of CSS with Firefox Web Developer extension), except for the issue that the overall page layout is not based on pixel widths that need to match each other. The page uses basically Arial (i.e. the great majority of visitors will see it in Arial), which has a large x-height and therefore has increasing problems as line length is increased - it becomes more and more difficult to the eye to follow the lines. You have made the precaution of setting line-height to 1.4. Without it, the appearance would be rather poor. At present, the width is at the limits of being too large for comfortable reading. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
