[Sigia-l] width limits for a body of text

[John McCrory]

I found these items in my bookmarks that might be helpful. First, the issue
of text width was discussed on SIGIA-L before:
http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0202/0293.html

You might also find Usability.gov's reading and scanning page helpful. It
has guidelines and pointers to the research behind the guidelines:
http://usability.gov/guidelines/readscan.html

One of those research links is to the article Timo Arnall mentioned. Another
can provide some quick data on the subject: "Text Width and Margin Width
Influences on Readability of GUIs" by Melissa Youngman and Dr. Lauren
Scharff:
http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/textmargin.html

There is also the related question of font readability:
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/3W/fontSR.htm

Yet, after reading up on this subject I'm not fully satisfied with the
measurements that have been done. How is "readability" measured? It seems to
be a combination of asking the users for which text width or font they
prefer, a highly-subjective question, vs. measuring the time it takes for a
user to read or scan a given piece of text. Of course, the clients usually
don't care about these sort of research quibbles...


   John McCrory
   Webmaster 
   Vera Institute of Justice
   http://www.vera.org/