On 8/11/13 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 11:25:02 -0700
Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
For a column of text to be readable it should have not much more than
10 words per line. Going beyond that forces eyes to scan too jerkily
and causes difficulty in following line breaks. Filling an A4 or
letter paper with only one column would force either (a) an unusually
large font, (b) very large margins, or (c) too many words per line.
Children books choose (a), which is why many do come in that format.
LaTeX and Word choose (b) in single-column documents.
[...]
Multicolumn is best for screen reading, too. The only problem is
there's no good flowing - the columns should fit the screen. There's
work on that, see e.g. http://alistapart.com/article/css3multicolumn.
A. HTML has good flowing, and has had it since freaking v1. No need for
upcoming CSS tricks: As long as the author doesn't go and do something
retarded like use a fixed layout or this new "zoom out whenever the
window shrinks" lunacy, then all any user ever has to do is adjust
the window to their liking.
Clearly HTML has made good progress toward reaching good formatting, but
is not quite there yet.
If someone expands their browser to be
two-feet wide and ends up with too much text per line, then really they
have no one to blame but their own dumbass self.
This is a frequent argument. The issue with it is that often people use
tabbed browsing, each tab having a page with its own approach to
readability.
B. There's nothing stopping authors from making their PDFs a
single-column at whatever line width works well. Like I said,
personally I've never found 8" line width at a normal font size to be
even the slightest hint harder than 10 words per line (in fact,
sometimes I find 10 words per line to be *harder* due to such
frequent line breaks), *but* if the author wants to do 10 words per
line in a PDF, there's *nothing* in PDF stopping them from doing that
without immediately sacrificing those gains, and more, by
going multi-column.
This started with your refutation of my argument that two columns need
less space. One column would fill less of the paper, which was my point.
This is, indeed, the motivation of conferences: they want to publish
relatively compact proceedings.
There is a lot of research and practice on readability, dating from
hundreds of years ago - before the start of typography. In recent years
there's been new research motivated by the advent of new media for
displaying textual information, some of which supports your view, see
e.g. http://goo.gl/qfHcJz. However, most pundits do suggest limiting the
width of text lines, see the many results of http://goo.gl/HuPEXV.
Bottom line, obviously multi-column PDF is a bad situation, but we
already *have* multiple dead-simple solutions even without throwing our
hands up and saying "Oh, well, there's no good *multi-column* solution
ATM, so I have no way to make my document readable without waiting for
a reflowing-PDF or CSS5 or 6 or 7 or whatever."
An obsessive desire for multi-column appears to be getting in the way
of academic documents that have halfway decent readability. Meanwhile,
the *rest* of the word just doesn't bother, uses single-column, and
gets by perfectly fine with entirely readable documents (Well, except
when they put out webpages with gigantic sizes, grey-on-white text, and
double-spacing - Now *that* makes things *really* hard to read. Gives
me a headache every single time - and it's always committed by the
very people who *think* they're doing it to be more readable. Gack.)
Again, two-column layout is being used as a vehicle for putting a wealth
of information in a good quality format that is cheap to print and bind
(most conference proceedings are simply printed on letter/A4 paper and
bound at the university bindery). The rest of the paper publishing world
has different constraints because they print document in much larger
numbers, in a specialized typography that use folios divided in
different ways, producing smaller, single-column books. It strikes me as
ignorant to accuse the academic world of high-brow snobbery because it
produces good quality printed content with free software at affordable
costs.
I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but
its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are
already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of
paper - PDF just clinches it for them.
Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink
on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time,
the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and
only future will tell what the right replacement is.
Andrei
