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Balancing text for better readability

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: Balancing text for better readability

#71

Post by [deleted] »

arrrg wrote: post #26
lnanek2 wrote: post #25

Ugh, 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.

[deleted]

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#73

Post by [deleted] »

arrrg wrote: post #26
lnanek2 wrote: post #25

Ugh, 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.

[deleted]

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#74

Post by lucian1900 »

cowsaysoink wrote: post #52
edanm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on a MacbookAir(OSX) running Chrome, looks fine to me.

That's because you have OSX font rendering, here is what it looks like on ubuntu: http://i.imgur.com/YysUNuX.png I'd hate to see what it looks like on windows (especially chrome which makes fonts even thinner).

Same on iOS for me. Totally unreadable.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#75

Post by benaiah »

mcargian wrote: post #2

I 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.

This is probably due at least in part to the Mac's text rendering, which is considerably thicker than Windows. It's pretty common to find text that is ridiculously thin, mostly on designer's websites. I'm no devotee of Windows or Mac (though I don't own a Mac yet), but it seems pretty clear that the design crowd needs to start at least spinning up a simple Windows (or even Linux - Ubuntu's text rendering is in between OS X's and Windows') VM and make sure that their text is readable on the platforms that nearly everyone uses. Even Android and (I believe, though I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong) iOS don't render text as thickly as OS X. Failing to optimize for different text renderings and making your text extremely thin alienates both the mobile market and 95% of the PC market.

Also, Chrome has terrible, evil, nasty text rendering in general, at least on Windows. I prefer it to IE10, but the web does look much better in IE, which actually has decent text rendering.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#76

Post by fudged71 »

bramstein wrote: post #64
fudged71 wrote: post #46

Chrome still doesn't support CSS3 hyphenation. I wish they would, because it has a huge impact in web typography. http://caniuse.com/css-hyphens

I agree, hyphenation is crucial to proper line breaking. If you don't mind a JavaScript solution you can have a look at: * http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/ * https://github.com/bramstein/hypher/

Yeah, I've looked into this in the past. In fact, it was exactly a year ago that I tweeted that Chrome doesn't support hyphenation. Had to double check today to see if it were still true.

In fact, it seems even more important now that they have Chrome on tablets and phones (this was announced one year ago as well, incidentally).

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#77

Post by thoughtcriminal »

arrrg wrote: post #15
mcargian wrote: post #2

I 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.

The font is the issue, not so much the color. Light fonts as the bread font are just a bad idea. Not that it matters even a little bit in this case. It's an irrelevant diversion of the worst kind. It's ignorant and foolish, something for small minds.

The "bread font"... is that a design term? I like it, and it intuitively makes sense. I'm just wondering if that's a common term or if bread is interchangeable with potato, pasta or some other starchy food that fills you up.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#78

Post by ZeroGravitas »

mcargian wrote: post #2

I 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.

Does this algorithm actually make things more readable? Or does it just make them look nicer. Not that there's anything wrong with that but sometimes the two goals clash, like with the text in this article.

And is it me or is the use of a series of single characters rather than a length of actual text a really weird choice?

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#79

Post by stdbrouw »

thoughtcriminal wrote: post #77
arrrg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The font is the issue, not so much the color. Light fonts as the bread font are just a bad idea. Not that it matters even a little bit in this case. It's an irrelevant diversion of the worst kind. It's ignorant and foolish, something for small minds.

The "bread font"... is that a design term? I like it, and it intuitively makes sense. I'm just wondering if that's a common term or if bread is interchangeable with potato, pasta or some other starchy food that fills you up.

I've definitely heard it before, though "body font" seems to be much more prevalent. It's probably a literal translation from a continental Germanic language, e.g. Dutch has "broodtekst" though the word refers to the actual body copy, not the font. German has "Bröttext".

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#80

Post by diebuche2 »

thoughtcriminal wrote: post #77
arrrg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The font is the issue, not so much the color. Light fonts as the bread font are just a bad idea. Not that it matters even a little bit in this case. It's an irrelevant diversion of the worst kind. It's ignorant and foolish, something for small minds.

The "bread font"... is that a design term? I like it, and it intuitively makes sense. I'm just wondering if that's a common term or if bread is interchangeable with potato, pasta or some other starchy food that fills you up.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotschrift
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