Quote:
Originally Posted by dwanthny
For any reflowing text where users routinely resize their fonts em is the best way to create consistent looking paragraph indents and spacing between paragraphs.
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Good point, dwanthny, and thanks for making it.
I think why I said "messy" was that I was thinking of the look of the end result; clearly it's personal taste, but if the text was blown up to the equivalent of around 18pt in the zoom capabilities of an eReader, I might still want a break between paragraphs, but I wouldn't want one of around 24 pt, as an em (top and bottom margin of 0.5 em) would likely give me. (This would depend on the typeface, wouldn't it? Is the em really directly calculated from the m glyph in the font in question, or is it some preset ratio, just as a point is assumed by most software to be 1/72nd of an inch?) And I wouldn't necessarily want the side margins to get proportionately bigger with the zoom of the font, would I? I am, as I said, a noob at this, though I've learned a fair bit since I started this thread; but it seems to me that if the side margins were expressed in ems, and the text size was zoomed, you're going to end up (depending on the device) with maybe two or three words per line in the middle of the screen and comparatively huge margins on either side. That doesn't seem desirable to me.
I prefer fully-justified text, with an indented first line and little or no spacing between paragraphs (well, okay, maybe just a bit!) So maybe a compromise seems reasonable: pts for left and right margins and the 1st-line indent, and maybe ems for paragraph spacing, if you use it. How does that sit?
Do please let me know of anything I've missed taking into account, though; I do want to learn, and really value the responses.