On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 06:37:04AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
Readable: Easy, interesting and enjoyable to read
well formatted paragraphs are both easy and enjoyable to read - i.e. readable. bizarrely formatted paras with randomly strewn line-feeds and semi-colons are neither.
Legible: Presented in a written physical format that facilitates reading.
i deliberately didn't use the word legible because illegible to me implies badly scrawled or scribbled or smudged or similar - none of which seemed appropriate for electronic text.
Text suffering from poor legibility can be fixed through better typography, or in some cases turning on a reading lamp. Text suffering from poor readability can be fixed by rewriting it to make the semantic content more easy to discern.
readable doesn't necessarily imply sensible or correct or even especially well-written, just that it's possible to read without any more difficulty than is necessary due to the content. etexts suffering from poor readability can be improved by good formatting. it won't improve the content but it will improve the readability. i find Rohan's messages actually painful to read, entirely due to the formatting not the content. i'm not usually bothered by left or right justification (although centred text is a pain) but all those widowed and orphaned words and paragraphs are jarring in the extreme. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>