Discussions of current MRB issue

Don Holeman writes:

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I would like to offer a suggestion regarding the new format. Full page width display makes it difficult to read on monitors with widths now commonly exceeding 1024 pixels. In your plans for future development you might consider reducing the page width of displayed articles and making it a fixed width. Optimal dimensions are always a moving target but a width between about 450 to 550px would be appropriate, perhaps even columating the page to display two columns at a time.

Also, you are using a serif font which you might consider changing to a sans serif. I recommend Georgia, which ships with WinXP.

Both suggestions are intended to help readers maintain their focus on a line as they scan across the page. As the scanning arc increases the ability to maintain line continuity decreases. Serif fonts were developed to assist readers of print to maintain line continuity but the resolution of monitors is insufficient to render them well enough to achieve this effect and readers are actually more comfortable with a sans font when reading online.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Do others agree? Does anyone know how to implement the page-width suggestion? (I don't know much HTML.) -|Tom|-

Brian Beaumont writes:

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The MRB print formats just fine on my Mac at home (Safari), but on the Windows 2000 machine I use at work (IE), the 30 or so characters at the right of each line are off the printed page. I see no printer friendly link.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This might be related to the page width issue. Do any of you have experience at web page design? -|Tom|-

I'm seeing a likely problem with Figure 2 and or Figure 3.

There are two images near the lable Figure 2, a larger one to the left and a smaller one to the right. And there is a text box that refers to itself as "text box for figure 3". But there is no label "Figure 3".

The smaller image next to the label Figure 2 seems to fit with the text in the figure 3 text box.

LB

All of my computers are set to 1280 by 1024 or higher. Some of them are running IE, some Firefox. I'm not experiencing any significant display related problems.

However, it might not be good to use my experience to judge such things. Most people walk up to my computers and say things like "everyting is so small, can you actually read that?". My vision is not perfect (and has declined noticeably over the last decade or so - I used to be able to read a monitor from across the room), but it is still better than most others.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Larry Burford</i>
<br />I'm seeing a likely problem with Figure 2 and or Figure 3.

There are two images near the lable Figure 2, a larger one to the left and a smaller one to the right. And there is a text box that refers to itself as "text box for figure 3". But there is no label "Figure 3".

The smaller image next to the label Figure 2 seems to fit with the text in the figure 3 text box.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I changed the caption so it is more like the other three captions. Does it look right on your screen now? -|Tom|-

It looks better. There still seems to be some (minor) layout problems relative to these two figures and their labels, but I want to think about it for a while.

How much control do you have over the positioning of drawings and text with HTML? I'm guessing that there are some things that don't work as well as one would like.