Jon Noring wrote:
Joey wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
furthermore, they're being calculated in the wrong manner. when you break lines according to simple character-count, the underlying assumption is the use of a monospaced font.
and that's a bad assumption regarding people reading books, because nobody should read a book using a monospaced font; that's just inviting eye-strain and fatigue to ruin the experience.
with as loudly as people complain about the unpleasantness of on-screen reading, we must do everything we can to nudge 'em into an experience that lessens the irritation as much as possible.
I disagree with the above.
Personally, I find monospaced, serifed fonts to be the easiest to read, and am frequently frustrated by the lack of books that use a monospaced font, and I wonder who is to blame for it.
In all of the software usability testing that I've done over the years (mostly involving web applications), monospaced fonts consistently score the highest for readability and comfort with the users.
Do you have some pointers to research that might explain why the prevailing wisdom is that monospaced fonts are "bad"? I've tried various google searches, and only managed to discover results that agree with my position.
Over the years there's been fairly extensive experiments performed on a large sample of people who read printed text and where many typographic settings are varied. These people are tested for reading speed and reading comprehension, and asked about personal preferences. The most famous of these tests were those done by Tinker and associates (Bill Hill in his tome, "The Magic of Reading" refers a lot to these studies.)
For example, some of the tested typographic settings included general font types (serif vs. sans serif), font spacing (proportional vs. monospace), font size, leading, line length, margins, text justification, etc., etc.
For studies agreeing with, and disagreeing with many of these assertions see: http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/text.htm, and linked references. Personally, I prefer proportional, sans-serifed fonts (Tahoma is my favorite). And I get really annoyed with people (like Jon) who want to set the line length for me, filling the remainder of my desktop with blank space. If I want shorter lines I will resize my User Agent window, thank you very much. Oh wait, I can't do that with non-reflowable PDF, can I. And I can't change the font either, can I. So I'm stuck with whatever, BowerBird or Jon Noring, or Marcello Perathoner, or Jakob Nielsen thinks is best for me. To be honest, I haven't looked at any of these competing PDF expressions of Alice, because I can't see how PDF has any value at all to an end user. Arguing about how PDF should be presented is much more a discussion of angels and pinheads than _any_ XML discussion that has ever occured on this list.