How determining the number of signs per line?

[Computer5]

Hey!

I would like to determine the number of signs per line to 85. That's about the value of Spiegel.de and FAZ.de. As I think and somebody told me, that value is perfect for reading.

Thanks for your help!
C5

[Don Chambers]

Signs per line? I do not understand.

[Computer5]

Hello <-- 5 signs.
I like that serendipity makes a line break after 85 signs.
Serendipity begins a new line after more than 100 signs.
That is less comfortable to read.

[Don Chambers]

5 characters? Can you show me a specific page where you want this?

Serendipity templates do not typically limit lines to a specific number of characters. However, the number of characters per line will be influenced by the width of the containing element which can be changed with css.

[Computer5]

Hi Don!

It's that page here: www.durblo.de

Thank you very much for your help!
C5

[kleinerChemiker]

At my computer there is no linebreak at 100 chars. F.e. the first line hase over 200 chars. I don't think limiting to chars is easily possible, but you could change the width to a fixed width that comes in the range of your wanted char count.

[Computer5]

And how can I change the width?

Thanks
C5

[onli]

Don't. What you want to do is far from how text on the internet should be regarded.

You can't set the characters per line via the width because you can't know how big the font-size is. Even if you could control all that and ignore the browser-settings of your visitors, you still wouldn't know how big the screen of them is, so you couldn't know a good setting.

It would be the best to choose a good default and a template which resizes dynamically and to stop worrying about that :)

[Computer5]

Hey Onli,

can you recommend me one good template? I like that the text looks similiary compact like on pages of www.spiegel.de and www.faz.de.

Thanks a lot!
C5

[onli]

Therefore, it should be enough to pick a template with a "small width"-content-area, maybe the i3theme-template could be fitting.
Or, since you linked to newspapers, one of the magacine-templates: kinetic or Mimbo

[yellowled]

You can't set the characters per line via the width because you can't know how big the font-size is. Even if you could control all that and ignore the browser-settings of your visitors, you still wouldn't know how big the screen of them is, so you couldn't know a good setting.

Oh, gosh. I don't know if I can comment on that in just a few lines, but I'll try

Basically, you're right - a web site should never restrict the font size. The user should always be able to read text on the internet in the font size he prefers, accessibility being the primary reason. Then again, typography and readability are important factors in a design as well. One assumption which in my humble opinion is wrong is that users should be able to scale text indefinitely - that's simply not possible. User should be able to scale text on a web site two times without the breaking the layout, i.e. hitting [Ctrl] + [+] two times in Firefox. (Nobody really makes text smaller on the web.) Then again, this also depends on the initial font size - it's very different if you scale two times with a default value of 10px compared to a default value of 16px.

There actually is a solution for this - elastic layouts, i.e. layouts based on width in em. Jon Tan explained this much better than I could ever do in his article on elastic layouts.

Downside? Of course there's a downside Elastic layouts are not exactly easy to implement, and they only work well if there's enough space to avoid horizontal scrolling. Oh, and don't even get me started on mobile browsers with a teeny screen width ...

YL

[onli]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understood this, even with an elastic layout you can't control the characters per line, as characters don't have the same width. As all the font-size-units (also em) describe a vertical size, that won't work.

Of course, using javascript, one could do that. But i think we agree that's not an option. Using a fitting template with achieves the effect of a compact look, which seems to be the target, is the best choice.

[yellowled]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understood this, even with an elastic layout you can't control the characters per line, as characters don't have the same width. As all the font-size-units (also em) describe a vertical size, that won't work.

If you set width: 10em; and font-size is 16px, the width will be 160px. So if you set every width of every element in em, the widths will always relate to the - watch out! - user's font-size. That - together with a sensible overall typography - is the best approximation one can get to. Unfortunately (I actually consider it to be unfortunate since I think typography and readability are very important assets in a design), CSS doesn't offer anything like "line-length: 60chars" or something.

Of course, using javascript, one could do that. But i think we agree that's not an option

Yes, we do. (No, it isn't.)

YL