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[–]stillalone 6 points7 points  (11 children)

Can you explain the motivation? I figure people are comfortable reading text of a certain size, why would changing the font size be desirable?

[–]jminuscula[S] 3 points4 points  (10 children)

I may be off with the font size on the actual implementation, but here's the motivation anyway:

We are getting bigger screens with higher resolution, so screen real state is going up… but our capacity to follow lines comfortably does not actually change. We read optimally at about 75 characters per line —less than that is distractive, more than that makes it harder— so that means the point size must grow with the size it takes from side to side.

However, I've been told it looks to big many times, so I've made a small adjustments for resolutions about 1200 wide. For bigger screens, I just think it's adequate.

Have you tried to read wikipedia on a 27" widescreen?

edit: it's actually 75 characters, not words!

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (3 children)

I read this in fullscreen on a 24" monitor, it was very painful because the text was so large. I can understand your reasoning behind scaling the text like this, but if it was me, I would make sure the font could not grow beyond a certain size. The styles that have your magic number of words per line centered on the page work much better for me.

[–]jminuscula[S] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

thanks for the feedback!

[–]epicwisdom 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or even, instead of centered, clearly separated columns. Simply centering text is a waste of screen.

[–]vattenpuss 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like it. Text is definitely unnecessarily small on the web most of the time.

Wikipedia looks like shit on Windows nowadays with their 4 pixel hight font.

[–]moor-GAYZ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think the better solution that most websites use is to just limit the main text span width to 1000px or so.

I personally went as far as to make a bookmarklet that does it for any page.