Typography

Member lesson

Line length and readability

Lesson 12 of 34 in Typography.

The right Line Length & Line Height in Typography · Pimp my Type
Lesson

Line length en.wikipedia.org is how far the eye travels before it has to find the start of the next line. The print figures everybody quotes: 66 characters per line as the ideal, 45 to 75 as the workable band, 40 as the floor below which justified setting starts tearing holes in itself, and past 80 as too long for anything you expect a person to read straight through.

28 ch · toonarrow62 ch · reads104 ch · too wide45 to 75 characters is the working range
Three text columns: too narrow, correct, too wide.
Two pages of grey text lines, a wide one where a dotted return path misses the next line and a narrow one where it lands correctly.
A dotted path shows the eye sweeping back after each line. On a very wide page it lands on the wrong line; in a narrower column it finds the next one easily.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Roughly how many characters should a line of body text hold?

    • 45 to 75
    • 20 to 30
    • 100 to 130
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Characters per line, spaces included. The unit that actually governs whether a paragraph is comfortable.”

    • Em square
    • Han character
    • cpl
    • CJK
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Whether a reader will keep going. Different from legibility, which only asks whether the shapes can be told apart.”

    • Font
    • Readability
    • Typeface
    • Revival

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