[thaumasiotes]

> The OP thinks that humans read thinner columns faster. Generally, this seems not to be the case, so maybe we should treat his main conclusion with some skepticism.

> In any case, it's probably best to refer to the scientific literature.

You might not think so if you read the literature review which takes up most of that paper. The literature covered is generally focused on questions of no obvious interest and then, even in its own terms, finds little or no effect. Particularly funny is the paper (Youngman and Scharff (1998), covered in §2.7) comparing the independent effect of physical line length vs physical margin length. Or in other words, they investigated whether it's faster to (1) read six inches of text with half an inch of blank page to the right of the text, or to (2) read six inches of text with a full inch of blank page to the right of the text.

The paper you cite also goes out of its way to express the authors' dismay over the extreme nature of one experiment invalidating the finding they wish to support:

> The study also fails to replicate [the finding of] Dyson and Kipping (1998a) and earlier studies that more characters per line can result in faster reading. The difference may be due to the extreme nature of the longest line, i.e. 132 characters in 12 point Arial (rather than 10 point Arial used by Dyson and Kipping). The line length therefore not only has more characters but is also physically longer because of the larger type size.

later:

> A setting with no margin would not be typical practice, but may have been included to assess an extreme of a variable in a similar manner to using 132 characters per line.

How unfair!

Of course, as I read your comment on Hacker News, it contains a line of 130 characters.

This paper isn't even trying to address the questions you think it's addressing.

[grey-area]

On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen). Personally I find the max line length on HN really uncomfortable.

> nature of the longest line, i.e. 132 characters in 12 point Arial (rather than 10 point Arial used by Dyson and Kipping). The line length therefore not only has more characters but is also physically longer because of the larger type size.

I'd say anywhere from 50-100 characters is fine for line length, stray too far outside that and you're not allowing enough words to scan well, or have too many so that it's hard to jump to the next line.

[thaumasiotes]

> On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen).

I'm actually doing two things to shorten the line width as measured in characters. #1, my browser window is set to a size I find reasonable, not fullscreen. #2, I have HN configured at "110% zoom" (not sure precisely what that means, but it's how Firefox reports it), which makes the text larger and therefore allows fewer characters per line.

[alkonaut]

> The OP thinks that humans read thinner columns faster.

Tbf, "reading faster" in the linear sense is probably not exactly the metric to use when writing text. When writing, I usually need to jump randomly a lot in the text to cross reference something (from the last paragraph, the last sentence, or the beginning of the current sentence). It's a kind of nonlinear scanning that I'm guessing could be more efficient in narrow column text, even if wider columns would be faster to read from beginning to end.

[speleding]

Your points help with discounting the claim that long lines read faster. But that does not say anything about OP's claim that short lines are better.

I'm not convinced by OP's argument "New York Times does it": pretty much any book does the opposite.

Perhaps we need more/better research.

For what it's worth, I set my screen to be very wide when I write because I like to write each sentence on a single line: it allows me to easily spot sentences that are too long, a mistake I often make.

[thaumasiotes]

Your points help with discounting the claim that long lines read faster. But that does not say anything about OP's claim that short lines are better.

Yes, that's true. I was not trying to dispute or support OP's claim that short lines are better. I was trying to dispute my immediate parent's claim that the way to handle questions like this is to refer to the scientific literature.