4 leading spaces, is that right? Let's see...
I used to write all my online posts like this in my early days of having
own personal email address. My primary email is from 1991 and I used it,
and DOS-based tools, to go online from 1991 until the late 1990s. At 1st
I ran DOS tools from a floppy, then on my own PC with OS/2 2, then under
Win95, then under NT 4. Gradually all the tools that were current at the
time became Windows-based, so I switched. It just became too hard to not
use Windows, and that meant proportional fonts, and that meant that folk
couldn't see that I was writing fully-justified text... so I stopped.
If this works (it looks all right in the editing window to me) then this
is the first time in a decade that I've tried writing justified text. At
the time when I did it constantly, it barely slowed me down. It helps if
you have a good vocabulary and you can just substitute longer or shorter
words on the fly.
Heh. It worked. Maybe I should start writing all my HN responses like
this. :-)
In the early '90s I occasionally wrote circular messages, and once, I
recall spending a good chunk of an hour composing one in the shape of
a Christmas-tree: stacked triangles, gradually getting wider from the
top to the bottom of the "tree". One letter wide at the very tip, and
then 2 at the top of the next triangle. The bottom of each triangle 2
letters wider each time, I think. You get the gist. I widened the top
as there are not many 1-letter words in English and few 2-letter ones
to choose from.
Why are novels laid out the way they are? It's almost as though its not as simple as "bad for reading" but rather a feature of the content.
imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan.
If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings
Video games are routinely stomping over all known rules of good user interface in the name of art. And that's okay because it's a leisure activity, and efficiency and comfort is not the goal. I suspect the same thing is true of novels - making the text physically easier to read wouldn't make the story emotionally easier to enjoy, so they intentionally choose a suboptimal text layout for aesthetic reasons.
The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.
Cost has always been a major factor in publishing fiction. 25% fewer words per line may boost comprehension by $x% but definitely increases cost by 25%. When markets are as price sensitive as leisure, cost is a big factor in the decision. Books don’t sell on a price per printed page basis. Mainstream publishers with existing distribution contracts are especially sensitive because of print runs.
When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.
Old newspapers have overly narrow columns that make both full justification and hyphenation ugly. I don’t think we should be looking at 100-year old newspapers for inspiration. Maybe look at them and see how far we’ve come and how much improvement we have in modern printed matter.
Instead we should look at modern books. Without paying good money to use tools like InDesign, just use LaTeX with microtype together with the default margins. You will get the ideal width for text lines (about 60 to 80 characters), full justification with minimal hyphenation.
The problem with your argument is that if you look at 100 year old books and modern newspapers, you arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion - it seems we ditched full width text a long time ago and fully switched to narrow columns, and it must've been for a reason!
Dictionaries in columns statistically reduce white space and thus reduce the page count.
Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.
So multicolumn layout increases whitespace in newspapers but decreases it in dictionaries? Funny how it always does the exact thing needed to disprove whatever I say in this exact moment.
Well ok ... If a full width newspaper needs the whole sheet and you put columns to reduce the necessary whitespace, you would end with blank space that you can fill with more articles or ads.
You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.
That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."
The passage has a couple commas where it shouldn't and doesn't have
some commas where it should just for justification. So it's trading
one type of particularity for another, and I favor grammar more. :)
