Wow. Grey text on a white background. This is really annoying to read on a matte screen.
A little ironic given the subject matter?
Balancing text for better readability
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#22Why not just use the Knuth-Plass algorithm as implemented in http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/ ?
Bram Stein works for Adobe :) We did look into it but it was not fast enough for the needs of browsers.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#23I think it's odd that a post about readability has grey text (#686868) on a white background. Next to the black screen grabs the text is very light.
Which device are you using and with what light settings? I've received one report from a user saying that the text on my site is "unreadable" due to the contrast but nobody inside my organization can see what the problem is, so I'm interested in how other people are experiencing such problems.
Ubuntu Chrome & Firefox On MacbookAir screen: horrible on dell side monitor: amazing.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#24Why not just use the Knuth-Plass algorithm as implemented in http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/ ?
None of Knuth's extensive work on typography seems to be well respected among designers (I'd love to be proven wrong about that).
InDesign implements a version of Knuth-Plass, so a lot of designers use it, whether they know about it or not.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#25Ugh, I really hate newspapers and the like that stretch out words and letters randomly just to have it make a perfect block. Random spacing to meet your criteria of prettiness does not improve readability. This person centers too much is his problem, I think. Just left align, read down the page with every line starting in the same spot, stop when done. Yay. Most web readers don't even read every word anyway, they skim, and you are producing something anti-skimmable by not keeping a nice solid left line where all the text starts wherever possible.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#26Ugh, I really hate newspapers and the like that stretch out words and letters randomly just to have it make a perfect block. Random spacing to meet your criteria of prettiness does not improve readability. This person centers too much is his problem, I think. Just left align, read down the page with every line starting in the same spot, stop when done. Yay. Most web readers don't even read every word anyway, they ski…
Holy ignorance about layout.
Balancing headlines and the like is complete standard everywhere. Abusing letter spacing has nothing whatsoever to do with it and is generally frowned upon. If you see that someone made a mistake.
You are clueless.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#27Ugh, I really hate newspapers and the like that stretch out words and letters randomly just to have it make a perfect block. Random spacing to meet your criteria of prettiness does not improve readability. This person centers too much is his problem, I think. Just left align, read down the page with every line starting in the same spot, stop when done. Yay. Most web readers don't even read every word anyway, they ski…
I think the author is proposing moving more words down to latter lines, not increasing white space between the words.
Edit: check out their demo to see what I mean: http://adobe-webplatform.github.com/balance-text/demo/index....
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#28Why not just use the Knuth-Plass algorithm as implemented in http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/ ?
Bram Stein works for Adobe :) We did look into it but it was not fast enough for the needs of browsers.
The run-time of that particular implementation of the Knuth-Plass algorithm is quadratic in paragraph length, which is too slow for web browsers (which might have to deal with very long paragraphs). However, the algorithm can be implemented to run in O(n) for large n, or O(n log n) with smaller fixed constants. Though you might have some issues with the line breaks made by the browser.
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#29This is a very legitimate addition to CSS. I bet we will see it in a future release. It makes a lot of sense for headings. I hope it will not get abused for other text blocks (but I am sure it will).
Re: Balancing text for better readability
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which device are you using and with what light settings? I've received one report from a user saying that the text on my site is "unreadable" due to the contrast but nobody inside my organization can see what the problem is, so I'm interested in how other people are experiencing such problems.
Ubuntu Chrome & Firefox On MacbookAir screen: horrible on dell side monitor: amazing.
I'm on a MacbookAir(OSX) running Chrome, looks fine to me.