Ever wonder why some text seems easier to read than others? A few basic formatting changes can make reading text much easier. Factors like line spacing, font choice, font size and margins are key to legibility.

Let's look at an example. Here's a default paragraph of 12pt Times New Roman, spread across the full width of the page, with no extra space between lines.

A default paragraph of 12pt Times New Roman, spread across the full width of the page with no extra space between lines.

It looks familiar, but how easy is it to read? Times New Roman was originally designed for newspapers, where the columns were narrow and the lines were always quite short. The lines here look awfully long. Will it help if we make them shorter? Sure, it won't cram as many words on the page, but what's there might be a lot easier to read.

Here is the same paragraph, reformatted in several ways. Everything but the indent is standard in Office Word 2007. The new font is Calibri, the new default text size is 11pt, and the new default line spacing is 1.15 (115% of the font size), which is a little more space than in earlier versions of Word. We've used a paragraph indent to make the lines considerably shorter, too.

Here is the same paragraph, reformatted in several ways

In Office 2007, the new default font is Calibri, a typeface that was designed with current technology in mind. Calibri is a sans serif typeface with clean, open forms and rounded stroke ends. Despite the usual rule of thumb that serif typefaces are easier to read in text than sans serif, Calibri is comfortably readable both on screen and on paper. It looks a little bigger than Times New Roman, so the default size in Word is now 11pt, rather than 12pt.

Easier to read? You be the judge. Don't rely on our screen captures of the results; try it out yourself.

 

Read more about what two typography experts at Microsoft did to make text as readable as possible.

 

-- Annik (with Judy Safran-Aasen & John D. Berry)