ramsdell@celebes.mitre.org (John D. Ramsdell) (02/28/91)
I read documents announced in this group because I find the subjects very interesting. It pains me to find some of the documents hard to read simply because of poor typographic practices. A common practice is for writers to ignore the needs of their readers by placing too many characters on a line of text. The eight and a half by eleven inch paper size became popular in the days of typewriters. On that paper, a typewritten page with reasonable margins will contain text lines of about seventy characters, where the number of spaces is included in the count. Such a character count is considered the upper limit on what humans find comfortable to read. When typesetting software fell into the hands of untrained authors, they created typeset documents on eight and a half by eleven inch paper using margins appropriate for typewritten documents. They liked the large text area for displays, but the were oblivious to the needs of their readers. I have several suggestions for those who plan typesetting on paper designed for typewriters. The best solution is to use a double column layout. Large displays can be handled by letting them span both columns. Another solution is to produce pages of size five and a half by eight and a half, and print two pages on one typewriter page in landscape mode. A final solution is to simply use narrower margins. Good typesetting software should already give you appropriate margins. Do not modify the width of the given margins! Please show mercy to your readers, John