Is D the Answer to the One vs. Two Language High ,Performance Computing Dilemma?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 11:25:02 -0700
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> 
> For a column of text to be readable it should have not much more than
> 10 words per line. Going beyond that forces eyes to scan too jerkily
> and causes difficulty in following line breaks. Filling an A4 or
> letter paper with only one column would force either (a) an unusually
> large font, (b) very large margins, or (c) too many words per line.
> Children books choose (a), which is why many do come in that format.
> LaTeX and Word choose (b) in single-column documents.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Multicolumn is best for screen reading, too. The only problem is
> there's no good flowing - the columns should fit the screen. There's
> work on that, see e.g. http://alistapart.com/article/css3multicolumn.
> 

A. HTML has good flowing, and has had it since freaking v1. No need for
upcoming CSS tricks: As long as the author doesn't go and do something
retarded like use a fixed layout or this new "zoom out whenever the
window shrinks" lunacy, then all any user ever has to do is adjust
the window to their liking. If someone expands their browser to be
two-feet wide and ends up with too much text per line, then really they
have no one to blame but their own dumbass self.

B. There's nothing stopping authors from making their PDFs a
single-column at whatever line width works well. Like I said,
personally I've never found 8" line width at a normal font size to be
even the slightest hint harder than 10 words per line (in fact,
sometimes I find 10 words per line to be *harder* due to such
frequent line breaks), *but* if the author wants to do 10 words per
line in a PDF, there's *nothing* in PDF stopping them from doing that
without immediately sacrificing those gains, and more, by
going multi-column.

Bottom line, obviously multi-column PDF is a bad situation, but we
already *have* multiple dead-simple solutions even without throwing our
hands up and saying "Oh, well, there's no good *multi-column* solution
ATM, so I have no way to make my document readable without waiting for
a reflowing-PDF or CSS5 or 6 or 7 or whatever."

An obsessive desire for multi-column appears to be getting in the way
of academic documents that have halfway decent readability. Meanwhile,
the *rest* of the word just doesn't bother, uses single-column, and
gets by perfectly fine with entirely readable documents (Well, except
when they put out webpages with gigantic sizes, grey-on-white text, and
double-spacing - Now *that* makes things *really* hard to read. Gives
me a headache every single time - and it's always committed by the
very people who *think* they're doing it to be more readable. Gack.)

I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but
its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are
already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of
paper - PDF just clinches it for them.