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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 8/11/13 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 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.

Clearly HTML has made good progress toward reaching good formatting, but 
is not quite there yet.

> 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.

This is a frequent argument. The issue with it is that often people use 
tabbed browsing, each tab having a page with its own approach to 
readability.

> 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.

This started with your refutation of my argument that two columns need 
less space. One column would fill less of the paper, which was my point. 
This is, indeed, the motivation of conferences: they want to publish 
relatively compact proceedings.

There is a lot of research and practice on readability, dating from 
hundreds of years ago - before the start of typography. In recent years 
there's been new research motivated by the advent of new media for 
displaying textual information, some of which supports your view, see 
e.g. http://goo.gl/qfHcJz. However, most pundits do suggest limiting the 
width of text lines, see the many results of http://goo.gl/HuPEXV.

> 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.)

Again, two-column layout is being used as a vehicle for putting a wealth 
of information in a good quality format that is cheap to print and bind 
(most conference proceedings are simply printed on letter/A4 paper and 
bound at the university bindery). The rest of the paper publishing world 
has different constraints because they print document in much larger 
numbers, in a specialized typography that use folios divided in 
different ways, producing smaller, single-column books. It strikes me as 
ignorant to accuse the academic world of high-brow snobbery because it 
produces good quality printed content with free software at affordable 
costs.

> 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.

Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink 
on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time, 
the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and 
only future will tell what the right replacement is.


Andrei