h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi,
I have studied some Computer layout and the way letters should be formed and stuff like that. We were taught how to make a text optimal for reading, how the layout of the text should be to be as easy as possible to read. There are two things in the layout of the alabaster skin that could be improved.

The headers
A header should have a larger distance up to the last paragraph than down to the next. It should be possible to see that the header belongs to the paragraph below. Now the headers have the same distance to the paragraph above as to the one below. This is called that the header is "Floating" (Translated from the swedish term Flyter).

Line width
I have calculated that there are about 140 characters including spaces/line. This of course varies with screeen width, but my screen is not particulary big. The guideline for making books easy to read in this aspect is no more than 60 characters including spaces/line. A good book can be hard to read if the lines are longer than that. The reason for this is that the eyes get lost and have to retrack the place they were all the time.

It probably is hard to redesign, but I think the contents of the texts would benefit if the lines were a bit shorter. 60 characters /line probably is hard to achive, but something less than 140 is maybe possible? What I'm asking is that you limit the width of the text a bit.

You probably think I'm an idiot telling you what to do. But I'm only writing this because the text would benefit from the changes. Hope you won't hate me .

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Wadelius

Traveller in Time ready for a meltdown
"We do not hate we just

NB Alabaster skin is 'Outdated' that is; the development goes to the < <./>/dna/h2g2/burnel/</.> > skin. "

You are right about the headers (the settings of different skins cause all sorts of problems with the layout of the front page archive) but you can fix the line width for yourself by using a smaller browser view window rather than full-screen and/or by enlarging the size of the text displayed on pages in your browser settings.

I have switched to brunel now, and the line width is much better, about 105-110 characters /row.

About the headers, the problem is the same with brunel. The headers layout is probably in some stylesheet somewhere, and it shouldn't be to hard to change.

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Wadelius