10 Nov
2017
10 Nov
'17
9:58 p.m.
On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:43:36PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Toby Thain writes:
So for the Nth time, there are people who read, I'm one of them,
by looking down the middle of the text and getting the rest through
peripheral vision. I read easily 3-4x faster than a decently fast reader
and I get enough info that I can find the place where I need to go read
more closely later.
I can't imagine I'm the only person who does this, I'm special but not
that special :) So for me, wider is optimizing me out, not optimizing
for me.
Just don't move on without some limit. There
are real
cognitive/typographic reasons why excessively long lines hurt
comprehension. This is why both 500 year old books and 5 month old books
have narrow measures.
80 might be too narrow for most, but at some point beyond 132 is "too
far". :)
Well, I would claim that books have technological limitations that are
different than computer monitors. It's a matter of doing what's appropriate
instead of taking a dogmatic approach.
I will point out that while it's sometimes a pain, the reader/writer ratio
is a major driving force. I save on typing and use very terse code when
writing stuff for myself. But, when writing stuff where there are many
readers I feel that it's my job to put in the extra work to make it more
accessible to the reader, partly because I don't want the readers bugging me.