Balancing text for better readability • Hacker News Board

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#81

Post by thristian » Fri, Feb 08, 2013, 10:50 PM UTC

dylangs1030 wrote: post #65

Yes, the website is ironically displaying text in an inconvenient way for a bunch of users. But as for the content itself: why not just use left align justify? I understand that justify asymmetrically inserts spacing to apply a balanced center throughout, but is this really an issue? In what context are users so hypersensitive to readability issues that they need the justify spacing to not only balance the entire tex…

The linked article isn't about balancing individual word spaces within justified text, it's about re-wrapping the lines so that the last line isn't markedly shorter than the others, even in the face of changing viewport and font sizes.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#82

Post by arrrg » Fri, Feb 08, 2013, 10:56 PM UTC

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.

Haha, no, body text is them common English expression. I just translated “Brotschrift” literally to English and somehow convinced myself that it’s an actual English expression.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#83

Post by Skoofoo » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 1:27 AM UTC

dfc wrote: post #70

pjungwir wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These latter two examples are worse because the first splits up the subject and the latter splits up the prepositional phrase.

That was his/her point.

Both comments were written by the same person.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#84

Post by thoughtcriminal » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 2:03 AM UTC

arrrg wrote: post #82

thoughtcriminal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha, no, body text is them common English expression. I just translated “Brotschrift” literally to English and somehow convinced myself that it’s an actual English expression.

Lets start using it. I'm going to start calling it the "bread font" anyway. Maybe it'll catch on ;)

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#85

Post by sses » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 5:58 AM UTC

It's a good idea, but it needs to be fleshed out more for internationalization. Even for the given case, English, what exactly constitutes a word?

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#86

Post by DeepDuh » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 6:02 AM UTC

speeder wrote: post #49

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.

Why then, people insist in using those light fonts? Yes, it looks "clean" and "modern" but they are too hard to read!

Maybe the one who decided it has an Apple device with 'retina' screen? I was reading it on an rMBP and the font struck me as very pleasant, hence I couldn't understand the fuss here first. Helvetica Neue Light is quite popular on these newer Apple devices, it's good to know that it is a bad idea though.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#87

Post by fernly » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 8:35 AM UTC

The Knuth optimal balancing algorithm is implemented in C in the Gnu Core Utilities program "fmt" -- see http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ -- and is plenty fast enough for a browser to render text.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#88

Post by dylangs1030 » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

thristian wrote: post #81

dylangs1030 wrote: post #65

Yes, the website is ironically displaying text in an inconvenient way for a bunch of users. But as for the content itself: why not just use left align justify? I understand that justify asymmetrically inserts spacing to apply a balanced center throughout, but is this really an issue? In what context are users so hypersensitive to readability issues that they need the justify spacing to not only balance the entire tex…

The linked article isn't about balancing individual word spaces within justified text, it's about re-wrapping the lines so that the last line isn't markedly shorter than the others, even in the face of changing viewport and font sizes.

Okay. Thanks for clarifying!

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#89

Post by coldtea » Sat, Feb 09, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

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 real problem is that the font is too small.

The gray on white is actually ok. Even better would have been black on light gray. Too much contrast is a pain point when reading text with a backlight.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#90

Post by andreasvc » Sun, Feb 10, 2013, 1:22 PM UTC

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…

You are simply complaining about words and letters being stretched too far. If you pick up a random novel, you'll see that paragraphs are justified, through a variety of devices such as hyphenation, letter spacing, and generally microtypography. Most of the time this is done professionally and you have no idea because you don't notice.