maximum column width for easy reading
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What is the maximum width that the main text can be without making things hard to read?
I have seen some information on this number by I think @thesacredpath and maybe others but it seems it was always buried in a Post and the caution was not to go wider than xxx pixels.
Thanks for any help.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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There is debate about this, and some are now claiming that with wider monitors and higher resolution, the public is getting used to reading longer lines, but the actual hard evidence really doesn’t support that, at least not yet.
There are formulas that have been developed to determine optimum column widths, but for most people they would not know where to start with them since they can’t typically find the information in their blog’s CSS or HTML.
A general rule of thumb is about 60-70 characters (includes spaces and punctuation) per line which with normal font sizes and faces is going to come out to around 500px. For me, the maximum I like is about 90 characters. Anything more than that and if the stuff is compelling enough, I copy it out and paste it into MS Word, or a plain text editor and read it there (unless it is short). If it is too wide and just mildly interesting, I’ll typically head off somewhere else.
This will likely change over the coming years because no one reads books anymore, so it is likely that people will get used to reading longer lines.
The problem is that nearly everyone wants sites that are 2000px wide (even though the vast majority of those out there surfing the web have monitors under 1280px wide.
A lot of the above of course is just my opinion, but it is based on general good page layout design parameters and the good fortune to work with an extremely good graphic designer for many years.
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Thank you very much for your thoughts. I am helping a friend set their blog up and they seem to like real wide with light fonts (orange on white).
My main monitor is a 1680 wide but I don’t have the browser anywhere near that and my email opens much narrower.
Thanks again, this will help a lot!
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If you want to play with the forumula’s, take a look at this link. (http:// intentionally left off so I don’t get slammed by Akismet.
desktoppub.about.com/cs/finetypography/ht/line_length.htm
I run into clients all the time that want extremely wide sites because they are working on a 1680px wide monitor and they don’t stop to thing that only about 4% of people out there have that wide of monitor. The following link you can use as well when talking with the person.
onestat.com/html/press-release-wide-screen-resolutions-extremely-popular.html
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I would suggest trying to get them to stick with something that will work on a 1024px wide monitor since that is still a substantial chunk of what people are using as you can see from onestat.
I can’t find the link right now, but horizontal scrolling is one of the top ten things people dislike most on the web. #3 as I remember.
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Horizontal scrolling is high on my list of I really hate – right there with the ad that is put on the top of the page s when I scroll down the page to get to the article the ad goes away and now I am half way down the article only having read half the first sentence.
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