> Use a line length around 70 characters ... It doesn’t matter too much if your line length is 60 or 80 characters, but go too far either side of that and you might run into subtle readability issues.
Says a website using a painfully-large font size that results in a line length of only ~40-characters ;P. That said, despite using a much more reasonable font size, Hacker News goes out of its way to limit line length to ~40 characters even though there is extra margin it could be using to get up to ~50-60.
Now, I'm sure some people are going to balk and say that this website--and Hacker News--in fact have longer line lengths and I must be crazy, but the reason they look the way they do to me is because I am reading this on a phone... as are most people doing most of everything they do these days: using actual computers is now somewhat rare.
However, I honestly have no issue reading with a ~40 character line length! In truth, I am pretty confident that I prefer it to longer 60-80 character lines: I read books on my phone, and I have the font size set to reflow at ~40 characters per line, and if I move to landscape (at the same size) I find that difficult to track as the lines are simply too long.
Now, we might then conclude that this is somehow just obsolete advice caused due to a lot of designers having grown up during a time when people used to have devices (even computers) with larger screens and were maybe more used to seeing long lines of text on large sheets of paper, where obviously everything had longer lines than my narrow phone...
...but no: I'd argue that some of the best typesetters in the field, who had the strongest reason to care about optimizing for legibility and readability, worked for newspapers, and if you pull up a scan of an old paper--whether from the 1980s or the 1860s--you will find that they all prefer ~40 characters per line (and you will find the same with science journals and government registers and most magazines).
I will thereby claim that the only reason we put up with 60-80 character lines is because it feels like a waste on a widescreen monitor to enforce such a narrow column and the technology of scrolling makes it extremely awkward to have multiple columns (as anyone who gets angry at navigating PDF articles--almost all of which are typeset with ~40 characters per line--in a web browser experiences viscerally).
Says a website using a painfully-large font size that results in a line length of only ~40-characters ;P. That said, despite using a much more reasonable font size, Hacker News goes out of its way to limit line length to ~40 characters even though there is extra margin it could be using to get up to ~50-60.
Now, I'm sure some people are going to balk and say that this website--and Hacker News--in fact have longer line lengths and I must be crazy, but the reason they look the way they do to me is because I am reading this on a phone... as are most people doing most of everything they do these days: using actual computers is now somewhat rare.
However, I honestly have no issue reading with a ~40 character line length! In truth, I am pretty confident that I prefer it to longer 60-80 character lines: I read books on my phone, and I have the font size set to reflow at ~40 characters per line, and if I move to landscape (at the same size) I find that difficult to track as the lines are simply too long.
Now, we might then conclude that this is somehow just obsolete advice caused due to a lot of designers having grown up during a time when people used to have devices (even computers) with larger screens and were maybe more used to seeing long lines of text on large sheets of paper, where obviously everything had longer lines than my narrow phone...
...but no: I'd argue that some of the best typesetters in the field, who had the strongest reason to care about optimizing for legibility and readability, worked for newspapers, and if you pull up a scan of an old paper--whether from the 1980s or the 1860s--you will find that they all prefer ~40 characters per line (and you will find the same with science journals and government registers and most magazines).
I will thereby claim that the only reason we put up with 60-80 character lines is because it feels like a waste on a widescreen monitor to enforce such a narrow column and the technology of scrolling makes it extremely awkward to have multiple columns (as anyone who gets angry at navigating PDF articles--almost all of which are typeset with ~40 characters per line--in a web browser experiences viscerally).