In books, a baseline grid is often
employed, ensuring that text always appears in the same place on each page. This
means that the text on the opposite side of the paper doesn??™t appear in the gaps
between the lines on the page you??™re reading. Baseline grids often make for
extremely pleasing vertical rhythm, and are regularly used in print publications;
they??™re infrequently used online, but can nonetheless be of use, making a page of
text easier to read and navigate.
Columns can be used to make a page easier to read. This is common in newspapers
and magazines; online, the low resolution of monitors, and the (current) lack of
being able to auto-flow columns of text makes de facto text columns impractical,
but the reasoning behind columns is still handy to bear in mind. Generally, it??™s considered
easier to read text that has fairly narrow columns (although not too
narrow??”if there are too few characters, reading and comprehension slow down)??”
text that, for example, spans the entire width of a 23-inch monitor rapidly becomes
tiring to read. There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to line length,
although some go by the ???alphabet-and-a-half??? rule (39 characters per line), some
advocate the ???points-times-two??? rule (double the point size and use the number
for the number of characters), and others recommend a dozen or so words, or
about 60 characters.
A few highly useful online resources for web typography can be found at the following
locations:
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web: www.
Pages:
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127