Sent by Jukka K. Korpela on 7 February 2010 08:08
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/
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