From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography
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08 Set body text two to three alphabets wide
From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography
08 Set body text two to three alphabets wide
- Law eight. Set body text two to three alphabets wide. When you're creating a document that's meant to be read you wanna make sure that the text is legible. And we've talked about this before but legible text is simply text that is clear and easy to read. An important aspect of legibility is line length. Now, line length refers to the length of a line of text. It's the same thing as the width of a block of text. It's important that you set your body text blocks at a width that's just right. You don't want them to be too narrow and you don't want the width to be too wide. Here's an example of body text where the line length is too narrow. And because these lines of text are so short your readers are going to be constantly jumping from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. And that can be a little tiring and a little distracting. Narrow text blocks can also cause odd right margins if your text is set flush left. And this jagged edge is pretty visually distracting…
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Contents
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07 Set printed body text from 9 to 11 points4m 45s
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08 Set body text two to three alphabets wide4m 13s
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09 Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text4m 14s
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10 Separate sentences with one space, not two4m 11s
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11 Don't allow less than seven characters on a line6m 9s
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12 Avoid bad paragraph breaks5m 44s
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13 Avoid line-breaking hyphens4m 2s
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14 Signal new paragraphs once, not twice5m 4s
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15 Break up large blocks of text5m 17s
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