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Balancing text for better readability

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: Balancing text for better readability

#51

Post by pjungwir »

For subtitles and ledes, or really anything larger than the main body text, I actually prefer the
solution. It's important not only to break in a pleasing shape, but also to break at grammatically-sensible points. So it's better to say:

    Take the blue car
    to the shop
vs

    Take the blue
    car to the shop
or

    Take the blue car to
    the shop

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#52

Post by cowsaysoink »

edanm wrote: post #30
3pt14159 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu Chrome & Firefox On MacbookAir screen: horrible on dell side monitor: amazing.

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).

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#54

Post by pjungwir »

pjungwir wrote: post #51

For subtitles and ledes, or really anything larger than the main body text, I actually prefer the solution. It's important not only to break in a pleasing shape, but also to break at grammatically-sensible points. So it's better to say: Take the blue car to the shop vs Take the blue car to the shop or Take the blue car to the shop

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

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#55

Post by woj »

jakub_g wrote: post #43
woj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

font-weight is indeed the main problem, but regardless I hate this new trend of not making text black. What would a bookmarklet look like to set the body color to black?

The trends to make thin grey text on nearly-gray background are driving me nuts also. I have two global Stylish [0] styles in my Firefox and I toggle them when I need to read something on a page like this: 1) Enable Georgia font instead of the author's favourite thin font: html body, html div, html span, html p {font-family:Georgia !important;} 2) Make everything black (except links): html * {color:black !important;}…

Thanks Jakub. Just what I was looking for.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#56

Post by lowboy »

Tomdarkness wrote: post #39
evmar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still nearly unreadable for me. http://i.imgur.com/Xu13n7j.png The typophiles here will surely yell at me for getting the terminology wrong, but my experience is that fonts are heavier on OS X and whenever I see a site with whisper-thin text like the above I suspect it was tested on OS X only. Edit: removing the font-weight CSS attribute makes the page legible. The issue is that you specified a font-weight under…

Even in your screenshot it looks perfectly readable for me.

But I bet that the text you're looking at right now on HN is easier to read than the screenshot. Now consider that people might have dense screens, or sit further away from the screen than you do, or have poor eyesight.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#57

Post by lowboy »

nimbupani wrote: post #19
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.

Thanks for the feedback. I just fixed it.

I can read it comfortably if I lean in, but I'd rather not. The text here on HN is smaller than your site, and it's perfectly readable from my normal position.

Re: Balancing text for better readability

#60

Post by [deleted] »

bjxrn wrote: post #36
decklin wrote: post #32

I long for something that would just wrap all big paragaphs of text at 70-ish characters without hacking at element widths (I've tried user stylesheets, scripts... nothing satisfactory). If this were implemented, I imagine it would be easier to do that. (For example, the first line of the first paragraph of the post renders as 134 characters on my screen. Maybe I am just old, but I find this hard to read.)

What was wrong with setting a max-width to (for instance) 70ex for p elements?

[deleted]
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