Lee wrote:
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.
Interesting study! As I noted in my prior message, the studies done on typography have been mostly done for print. Some of the research transfers over to the lower rez screen milieu, some doesn't. It's good to see that there have been studies on the readability of online text. Regarding my style sheet... The beauty of the XML approach (provided the markup is done right) is the ability to apply different style sheets to a document. I've wanted to provide more style sheets to the "My Antonia" document in addition to the fixed line-length (in em) currently used as the basic one. Since my graphics arts abilities are pretty poor, I'm hoping others will provide some nice looking ones. I recall seeing some really nice ones for some PG/DP books. CSS Zen Garden demonstrates the extraordinary power to apply quite different looking style sheets to (effectively) the same document. See http://www.csszengarden.com/ With the right reading system, we can allow end-users to substantially tailor the presentation of XML documents where the publisher has provided one or more default ones -- effectively to override the CSS provided by the publisher. Of course, allowing end-users substantial ability to tailor presentation is something effectively impossible to do with PDF today (and the only possibility is to have tagged PDF along with a PDF viewer that is effectively an XML presentation system to handle the PDF tagging vocabulary.)
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.
Definitely! Jon