Re: How to display format=flowed?
* Thomas Zehetbauer <thomasz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-10-12 13:32]:
> On 2005-10-12 | 10:11:11, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> >By re-flowing, you mean "extend the line width to 140 characters"?
>
> To whatever width the terminal can display.
Ugh!
> >Why? Reader-friendly lines are well below 80 characters long.
>
> For printed newspapers it is customary to limit the line length to about
> 30 characters, BUT
> 1.) newspapers would otherwise have lines far longer than on a computer
> screen
> 2.) newspapers use columns
So? Newspapers could of course easily widen their columns to whatever
number of characters they see fit, but they keep the number small for
a good reason. BTW, we're not only talking about newspapers; you'll
hardly find _any_ printed material with a line length significantly
greater than 80 characters (apart from badly typeset MS Word stuff or
the like). This has nothing to do with 80x25 terminal limitations.
> In fact there are some scientific studies on online reading performance
> (Dyson and Kipping, Duchnicky and Kolers) that show that longer lines
> are read faster than narrow ones.
Reading perfomance != reader-friendliness. At least when it comes to
the latter, it seems to be undisputable that it is reduced by greater
line lengths:
| Dyson and Kipping (1998) also found that reading rates increased as
| characters per line increased. In their study using 12-point type, the
| 4-inch line length produced the slowest reading rate and the 7.3 inch
| line length produced the fastest. However, users preferred the 4-inch
| (102 mm) line lengths. They also reported that even though a single wide
| column was read reliably faster than three columns, users preferred the
| 3-column format.
|
| Youngman and Scharff (1999) used 12-point type and found that with no
| margins, an 8-inch line length elicited the fastest overall reading
| speed, when compared with 4 and 6 inch line lengths. Again, users
| preferred the 4-inch line length.
|
| Bernard, Fernandez and Hull (2002) had participants read 12-point prose
| text with line lengths of 9.6 inches (245 mm), 5.7 inches (145 mm) and
| 3.3 inches (85 mm). They found no reliable differences in the average
| reading speed for the differing line lengths. Their adult subjects
| preferred the two shorter line lengths.
[ http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/nov02.asp ]
HTH, Holger
--
PGP fingerprint: F1F0 9071 8084 A426 DD59 9839 59D3 F3A1 B8B5 D3DE