Line Length


Take a look at the following three paragraphs, and see which is easier to read. Also remember that the characters may appear far larger on your reader's screen than they do on yours.

80 characters per line:

Like many Internet innovations, Web search engines were hatched at universities
in the early 1990s. A few computer scientists figured out that if there wasn't a
way to index the information that had begun pouring onto the Web, things were
bound to get out of control fast. Taking a cue from the structure of Archie and
Gopher servers, which track and index software and text on the Internet for FTP
and Gopher clients, these programmers wrote software that crawls all over the
Web unattended (and most often in the wee hours of the morning), collecting data
and then automatically applying algorithms to sort that data into
keyword-searchable indexes.

72 characters per line:

Like many Internet innovations, Web search engines were hatched at
universities in the early 1990s. A few computer scientists figured out
that if there wasn't a way to index the information that had begun
pouring onto the Web, things were bound to get out of control fast.
Taking a cue from the structure of Archie and Gopher servers, which
track and index software and text on the Internet for FTP and Gopher
clients, these programmers wrote software that crawls all over the Web
unattended (and most often in the wee hours of the morning), collecting
data and then automatically applying algorithms to sort that data into
keyword-searchable indexes.

60 characters per line:

Like many Internet innovations, Web search engines were
hatched at universities in the early 1990s. A few computer
scientists figured out that if there wasn't a way to index
the information that had begun pouring onto the Web, things
were bound to get out of control fast. Taking a cue from the
structure of Archie and Gopher servers, which track and
index software and text on the Internet for FTP and Gopher
clients, these programmers wrote software that crawls all
over the Web unattended (and most often in the wee hours of
the morning), collecting data and then automatically
applying algorithms to sort that data into
keyword-searchable indexes.