Tired of hard-to-read online articles and posts? You're not alone. Reading online is different than reading paper. Apparently we tend to scan online text to a greater extent than with paper, so the text needs to be constructed a bit differently to be more readable online.

From Slate: How We Read Online

Personally, I think I completely disagree with most of that. it might be correct on average, but for me, if something is in bold, it had pretty well better be deserving of it.

I completely agree that the font should be some san serif one. Serifs are the devil.

As for people not reading longer passages, I think I'd put it on the writer not the format. 500 words in a single paragraph isn't any more than 500 words split into 10. If the paragraph is interesting, it will be read.

As for article length, I had a teacher in the 6th grade that said that anything written should be like a miniskirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to make it interesting. His words.

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Serifs make the difference between scribblings and literature.

Then again, I still prefer to read literature on paper.

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

That webpage was getting on my nerves to the point that I couldn't continue reading. Give me a standard paragraph without all the bold, dinky paragraphs, and other garbage any day. I'm with you Tog_.

__________________
WANTED:

Schroedinger's Cat

Dead And Alive

So, did nobody else notice that the article was written partly in jest?

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Of course.

In low resolution devices such as most computer screens I agree but once you get above 20-25 pixels to the character height serifs become more readable that sans serif and sans serif becomes the devil's work.

Which is what breaks the idea of one document for both printing and reading on the screen.

__________________
"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Okay, first off, if this article really was written in jest, I missed it. Completely.

As for sans vs serifs, on paper, like in a book or a newspaper I don't notice them at all. But anything on a monitor that has them is basically unreadable to me, regardless of the font size. I usually paste the article into Word then change it to Arial with a 12 font size, then zoom to page width which makes it about the same as a 20 point font. I can read for hours this way with less eye strain than I get with any book.

When I started working on my game guide site, I was concerned with the font. I wanted to make it easy to read since it's over 300 pages and growing. I had some input and the sans/serif debate popped up with one person stating that Times New Roman was the perfect font for any text. Another guy said that sans were better on screen, but not Arial since it's too compressed. In the end I went Verdana, which is what the default for this forum seems to be.

Since the site was aimed at a game based on comic books, I originally went Comic Sans, but was told by one person that that font gets old so fast that he only uses it in E-mails to people he wants to annoy.

Another project for this same game is player created in game billboards. They wanted to have some test ads from people to see if the software was working so I worked some up. Again, I was told that serifs are better for large print, no matter how bad I think it looks on the screen. On the 80 mile round trip to work, I pass a lot of billboards and on an informal count, about 60% use a sans font. I didn't count the ones that use a "novelty" font.

Maybe I'm just odd, but I really find serifs hard to read. Small ones are okay most of the time, but the Times font in particular is almost as bad as Mistral as far as readability for me.

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Poor grammar and spelling are greater obstacles to comprehension than anything else when I'm reading on-line.

Read it again, and see if you catch it this time.

You may have a point. I have to admit that reading online does not seem to strain my eyes as much as reading in print...

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I agree.

__________________
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

See, it's exactly the opposite for me. I can read books all day. I have to break up any online reading or it kills my eyes.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I agree with you.

It will probably end up as a purely individual matter. For myself I enjoy the physical heft, feel and (if old) the smell of a book. But I've been using them for fifty years and I've grown acustomed to their faces. While I could store my whole library on some peanut that fits on my palm I prefer browsing a couple of thousand books scattered around the house. For me, the book is an artifact as well as a source of information. But this is neither right or wrong, just me.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I'm with Gillian on this one - I can go far longer with a book than online.

__________________
WANTED:

Schroedinger's Cat

Dead And Alive

You're not the only one, Mike.
But I'm afraid that us bibliophiles might be a dying breed.

I love the smell of books in the morning - and at noon - and in the evening - and even in bed...

__________________
Join the Illuminati

Seemed like a relevant quote here

__________________
"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

me too--I've never tried these "paper ink" e-books like Amazon Kindle that are supposed to solve it (there's a Sony version on display at the local Borders, but it's low-res and slow-responding which I don't like, and don't know if Kindle is the same way or not--but it does have non-lighted text (i.e. you need a book light)). I've held off paying the dough for a Kindle or similar till I hear from more users about benefits and drawbacks versus paper books.

__________________
-----
Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Another problem with the original page-link posting--my mouse cursor just happened to be in the left-side index bar as I was scrolling down, causing HUGE menus to pop up overtop of the text I was half-reading.

That's a great example of how not to design a web page.

__________________
-----
Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info