Do you prefer Centered or F/L Chapters and Heads?

[Billi]

Honestly, I do prefer headings with a clear message over an abbreviation parade! Please, be kind to us foreign readers here whose mother tongue is not English.
/

To answer your question: I prefer centered and a (quite remarkable) margin to the next paragraph.

[theducks]

VARIETY
That said. Books within a series should have a consistent style.

When Left aligned, I prefer a Margin, similar to the Indent. I use Margin-Left because subtitles will have the same offset

I use different fonts, different stroke, with a box (similar to feedbooks),, with a partial box (Top and Right), Big first letter,

Why would I want to be boring? There was a reason (cold type) printshops had drawers upon drawers of different type.

Mono-stylistic is so 1980's dot matrix/ Glass Teletype thinking.

BORING

[cromag]

If there is no change in Font, Font size, or bolding, then I prefer Flush Left.

If the Font is different, larger, or bolder, then I prefer Centered.

[BadBilly]

I don't have much preference. I suppose I may lean slightly toward centred but not enough that it bothers me if it is not.

[SR Roddy]

In non-fiction books I think left is better. Now for fiction books I've seen it both ways and I honestly prefer it centered when I'm reading. I like a little more of an emphasis on where the chapter breaks. That's my resting spot in some cases and I like to be able to noticeably tell where it is while skimming a page.

[Sweetpea]

For me, it depends.

If it's only "Chapter 1", I don't mind either way, with a slight preference to center.
If it's a title like "1. The Boy Who Lived", I prefer it flushed left to the margin.

[4691mls]

I really don't care about the alignment of chapter headings, just as long as there aren't too many of them. Books that have 100+ chapters when the whole book is only a few hundred pages long - now that bugs me

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by tilia

I guess I have a small preference towards centred headings, but variety is good. I'm all for artistic freedom in this case.

This.

[1611mac]

OP here... I'm quite surprised that it doesn't matter to so many.... I'm also surprised that the issue of reading speed has not come up.

I'm not a fast reader and I'm trying to improve my speed. I find that suddenly having no text on left and having to "jump" to the center of the page to scan for text is disrupting...... Remember, I'm talking sub-heads too. I read a lot of non-fiction and the books I have use quite a lot of sub-heads.

[Yapyap]

My preference is also centred, although depending on the text, I'm also okay with left- or right-aligned.

For example if the chapter text starts with an illuminated letter, I do NOT want the chapter title to be anything but centred (and a fair amount above the text). On the other hand, when for example it's a book where the date and time of day of the "action" is important (and is used for chapter headings), then either left-aligned or even right-aligned to me works better than centred.

All this is about fiction; I rarely read non-fiction these days and haven't read any as ebooks.

[Ripplinger]

I always thought speed reading basics was to keep your focus somewhat centered, and you automatically pick up what's surrounding to the left and right then. That would make it seem centered titles would be best for speed readers.

But as I said, I'm ok with centered or left or even right aligned for chapter titles, as long as it's consistent through the book and nothing gets chopped off in different readers because of bad formatting. It's the body of the text where formatting is more important to me.

[BeccaPrice]

Sub-heads are another matter entirely. Sub-heads should be left-flush, but separated from the text by extra space above, and maybe by being in bold.

[HYPE]

Centered. Looks cleaner to me!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by 1611mac

I'm not a fast reader and I'm trying to improve my speed. I find that suddenly having no text on left and having to "jump" to the center of the page to scan for text is disrupting......

Disrupting your reading flow is kind of the point of chapter headings. They're supposed to make you stop and think "new chapter".