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

[karl fast]

> > They don't know these answers is a quantifiable way. However, I
> > think they do "know them" in a qualitative way: it's a big monitor,
> > the type on most web pages is too small.
> 
> Indeed! They may not be able to answer in a quantifiable way the
> various settings and they may not even know what DPI is. But they
> have played with various controls affecting DPI, font face, size,
> etc.

I don't think this follows from what I said.

I was suggesting that people know things like "text is small on my
monitor" but it doesn't follow that they
   (a) know they can change it
   (b) know *how* to change it, and
   (c) have actually changed it.

I don't think people go in and configure things like DPI, font face,
size, etc. I have met very few people who know you can do this, and
even fewer who actually do it.

In my experience most people who customize their machine customize
it for aesthetic reasons (colors, desktop wallpaper, theme) and NOT
for usability/productivity reasons (shortcut keys, screen
resolution, default font size in their browser, etc.) Alas, I have
no empirical evidence for this.

I stopped heavy duty customization of my machine long ago except for
a few things. These few things are related to the most important
applications in my life, those that I spend almost all my time in:
text editor, word processor, email client, and web browser (and even
here these customizations are *minimal*).


--karl