Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Go ahead.
Open a newspaper.
Here is one
[ http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/...can/index.html ]
Now tell me, how wide the space between columns is.
 Thank you DaleDe
When I said that the my version of formatting looked beter to me, I really meant that this setup is easier for me to read.
Reading is a very complex process. We read several words at the time. A good reader (understand person that is reading) can get in several words at a single glance. |
your example seems to confirm what i said, so i don't understand your point... in a paper newspaper, there are
margins around the edges of the pages, and there are
gutters between each column of text which i suppose you could argue are like small margins (it's not quite the same but it serves more or less the same purpose). when i click on the photo of the printed newspaper (with columns of text all of which are separated by gutters...), the page switches to an in-line presentation of the articles, and again there are small margins between the blocks of text and the edges of the window, or between any 2 columns. a margin does not have to be very big to count ; for example, when i format a text to make an ebook, i create a margin of 2% ; this is not very wide but it serves to allow the text some breathing room from the edge of the screen which in turn makes it easier for the eye to keep its place while going back and forth across the lines.
once again, white space is an important part of page layout and is not there just to look pretty. people figured out that space was necessary to improve readibility and comprehensibility on their own rather quickly, thus the convention of inserting a space between each word for example, and now that we have the technology to do so, this has been confirmed by scientific experiments which moniter the mouvements of the eye while reading, corresponding brain activity, and the effects of such modifications as increasing / decreasing the vertical space between lines (line height), increasing / reducing margins, lengthening / shortening the width of the column of text / page (too long lines of text, and the eye gets lost more easily on the way back from the end of the line, making the text much harder to read), masking the top half or bottom half of a string of characters (lower case characters, being more formally differentiated, are easier to recognize, to the point where you can read a word or sentence in lower case rather easily even if only the top half of it is visible ; this is much harder and sometimes impossible with upper case), whether fully-justified text is easier or harder to read than left-aligned with a ragged right edge, etc. the mechanics of reading is something that people have studied quite intensively in fact. i certainly don't claim to be an expert, but it's my job to know a minimum about it because i am a graphist and i get paid to know how to lay out text.
you are absolutely correct that reading is a very complex process, and that we do not read each individual letter one at a time (which is why, as the famous experiment has proven, you can jumble all the letters in each word of a paragraph, but as long as the first and last letters of each word are in place, you will be able to understand the text). however it is also a process which we now understand on a much deeper level than before and we can now explain exactly *why* some conventions of traditional printing serve a real purpose other than aesthetic.
you may *prefer* to read without margins, however this is a question of your personal taste, and *objectively*, overall, this actually makes reading more difficult. in addition, you clearly read with great ease and can overcome some additional difficulties ; do not forget that this is not the case of every person, even without taking into account those with difficulties such as dyslexia.