The 80 character wide columns probably have typographic reasons. The general rule is that everything wider than ~80 characters will make it easier for the reader to lose the line when jumping down to the next line, and therefore make the text harder to read.
I have some sort of eye/brain issue when reading big blocks of text if the line spacing is too tight I'll start reading the next line down in the middle of a sentence, particularly when I'm tired.
more text left to right (@~90% page width) + appropriate vertical spacing (~1.25 depending on font) = bueno for my eyeballs at all times.
sorry, personal preferences.
I'd actually like to see some metrics/research on that.
I know a few websites (google,etc) have done studies with eyetracking and such and tried to quantify what the user was looking at and make some generalized assumptions.
I'm not sure typography optimizations made based on the typical ADD user scanning for one little blurb of information from search engine results, work as well when the user is attempting to "consume" all the content on the page as in the case of an interesting news article or blog.
Comments
The 80 character wide columns probably have typographic reasons. The general rule is that everything wider than ~80 characters will make it easier for the reader to lose the line when jumping down to the next line, and therefore make the text harder to read.
I have some sort of eye/brain issue when reading big blocks of text if the line spacing is too tight I'll start reading the next line down in the middle of a sentence, particularly when I'm tired.
more text left to right (@~90% page width) + appropriate vertical spacing (~1.25 depending on font) = bueno for my eyeballs at all times.
sorry, personal preferences.
I'd actually like to see some metrics/research on that.
I know a few websites (google,etc) have done studies with eyetracking and such and tried to quantify what the user was looking at and make some generalized assumptions.
I'm not sure typography optimizations made based on the typical ADD user scanning for one little blurb of information from search engine results, work as well when the user is attempting to "consume" all the content on the page as in the case of an interesting news article or blog.