Line Height

[shapper]

Hello,

What is a good proportion between line height and text size?
I am trying to define nice readable text.

Thanks,
Miguel

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: Line Height

Scripsit shapper:

What is a good proportion between line height and text size?

It depends on the font family, the length of lines, and other factors
such as the presence of letters with diacritic marks or characters with
subscripts or superscripts. As a rule of thumb, browser defaults are
usually a little too small especially if you set font family to a
sans-serif font, as most authors do.

Here's a list of my recommendations , from a recent book of mine, though
it deals with printed documents (typically with line length matching
that of office documents according to the Finnish standard, about 134 mm
(or 157 mm), corresponding to roughly 70 characters for a font size of
12pt:

For 12pt font size, use a line-height of
14 pt for Calibri, Lucida Console
14.5pt or 15pt for Arial
15 pt for Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia
16 pt for Arial Unicode MS

(Of course, on a web page, you should set line-height relatively, as a
pure number, e.g. line-height: 1.21 or somewhat larger for Arial etc.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[shapper]

Re: Line Height

On Jun 16, 2:56 pm, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorp...@cs.tu t.fiwrote:

Scripsit shapper:
>

What is a good proportion between line height and text size?

>
It depends on the font family, the length of lines, and other factors
such as the presence of letters with diacritic marks or characters with
subscripts or superscripts. As a rule of thumb, browser defaults are
usually a little too small especially if you set font family to a
sans-serif font, as most authors do.
>
Here's a list of my recommendations , from a recent book of mine, though
it deals with printed documents (typically with line length matching
that of office documents according to the Finnish standard, about 134 mm
(or 157 mm), corresponding to roughly 70 characters for a font size of
12pt:
>
For 12pt font size, use a line-height of
14 pt for Calibri, Lucida Console
14.5pt or 15pt for Arial
15 pt for Tahoma, Verdana, Georgia
16 pt for Arial Unicode MS
>
(Of course, on a web page, you should set line-height relatively, as a
pure number, e.g. line-height: 1.21 or somewhat larger for Arial etc.)
>
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

I tried 1.21 with Verdana and I think it is to short. I am using 1.5
and it looks better. For example, http://www.smashingmagazine.com/,
uses 1.72.
In my case that is to much ... 1.5 looks better than 1.21 or 1.72.

Didn't try with Arial yet.

Thanks,
Miguel

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: Line Height

Scripsit shapper:

I tried 1.21 with Verdana and I think it is to short.

My suggestion means 1.25 for Verdana. My suggestions were primarily for
office documents and really minimum suggestions. Generally, Verdana is
unsuitable for use in copy texts on web pages, so it really matters
where and how you use it.

I am using 1.5 and it looks better.

Surely in _some_ situations, but it's impossible to say anything
specific without specific data.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/