What's the difference between traditional typesetting and website typesetting?

Clarity is influenced by font design, screen optimization and micro layout. It relate to single characters, letter or glyphs that can recognize each other. We can't change the shape of the font, but we can choose the correct font and choose the corresponding layout. Speaking of clarity, many designers have reached an understanding of some standards, exploration methods and typesetting skills. For example, capital letters are more difficult to read than lowercase letters, and regular characters are easier to recognize than italics. Proper contrast between text and background will improve clarity, just like proper line width and line height. Compared with the lower part of letters, the upper part is more significant for scanning, but the height of rising and falling parts plays an important role in letter recognition, which is why many people think serif fonts are easier to recognize. As you can see, many factors come into play when we talk clearly.

Readability is the main concern of design. It is influenced by layout, placement of content blocks and presentation of independent columns. We can guarantee readability in many ways, many of which are influenced by readers' habits. Fundamentally speaking, the way people "read" website content is different from the way they read printed matter. It is very important to understand and design this behavior, which is also the key point of user experience design. Website typesetting needs careful consideration.

Line width is the length of each line of text. The optimal length depends on the context, but for left-aligned text blocks, the recommended length is between 45 and 75 characters (including punctuation and spaces). 66 characters is considered as the best length: this length is the most comfortable to read, so that the eyes don't have to move too far between the end of this line and the beginning of the next line. Don't make the line width too short, because moving from one line to another frequently will also make your eyes tired. Surprisingly, our recent research on layout design 1 found that websites containing a lot of text and layout (layout-related news, magazines and blogs, etc. ) has a longer line width, usually between 70 and 100 characters (the maximum number of characters per line). Generally speaking, each line has 75 to 80 characters. However, no research shows that such a line width will bring better or worse readability.