Line Height

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  • shapper

    Line Height

    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

    #2
    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")


    Comment

    • shapper

      #3
      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

      Comment

      • Jukka K. Korpela

        #4
        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")


        Comment

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