mailing list etiquette violators list

Lodewijk andré de la porte l at odewijk.nl
Mon Oct 26 17:46:35 PDT 2015


2015-10-26 18:28 GMT+01:00 Razer <Rayzer at riseup.net>:

> That's the ONLY time narrow columns
> are easy to read, unless your attention has a deficit and you lose track
> of your place on the line... The reason the columns are narrow is to
> allow for easier placement of advertising... the reason newspapers exist
> at all.
>

Not true at all. Many people have trouble tracking long lines, partially
because eyes are jumpy (not scrolling). Some people have this very
seriously, but are otherwise fine (far as humans go).

This is also something testable. There's empirical research. According to
this <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449290410001715714>
"An empirical demonstration carried out by Morrison and Rayner (1981)
confirmed that saccade size is consistent in terms of number of characters,
and not visual angle"
meaning, you plop your eyes a certain amount of characters - not angle. You
read a certain amount of chars per peek, and variable width might confuse
you (maybe).

"If the lines are too short, readers cannot make use of much information in
each fixation. If line lengths are too long, the return sweeps to the
beginning of the next line are difficult."
Pretty straightforward/as expected

"(..) 2.2A + 21 ms (Carpenter 1977), which means that the greater number of
return sweeps with shorter lines will add more to the time than longer
lines."
Not sure about the unit of A (amplitude?) but it means you take 21 ms, plus
some measure of distance, to move your eyes from x to y.

The authors seem to be fans of the idea that reading speed simply improves
from longer lines, up to about 130 characters, after which the line becomes
unwieldy. Some in-print research showed 70 or 52 (?) characters to be the
ideal width. I find it amusing that these relate roughly to coders'
standards of 60, 80 or 120 characters.

Ultimately, a bit offtopic and I apologize.

Postultimate, write a preprocessor if you hate malformatted text so much?
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