![]() ![]() Less serious is having too much line space. ![]() Setting spacing much below 100% will render it completely unreadable. This makes for poor readability and atrocious accessibility. Setting line spacing at 100% means that letters on adjacent lines can touch, because there’s no additional space between the lines. Most serious is having too little space between the lines. There are two main risks when it comes to line spacing: too little, and too much. ![]() You should experiment to see what looks best with your text. In fact, anything from about 120% up to 200% is acceptable, but 140% tends to be the most quoted sweet spot. ![]() Conventional wisdom is that line spacing of 130%-150% is ideal for readability. Line spacing is commonly measured as a percentage of font size. The importance of line spacing for UX design comes from the power it has to render a block of text more or less readable. Leading, line spacing, and line height all refer to the same thing. Some modern design applications like Photoshop still use the term leading, while in HTML and CSS, the attribute is called line-height. So it’s thanks to typewriters that double-spacing lives on today in the age of the computer. And because double-spaced lines leave more room for comments and notes, double-spacing caught on in academic, legal, and industrial contexts where text can be pretty heavy. The only way of increasing line spacing on a typewriter was to add an extra carriage return after and insert a whole empty line, doubling the line spacing. Because they had fixed line-height (usually 12pt per line), typewriters were mechanically incapable of offering line space options. When typewriters appeared later, line spacing went through a process of standardization. So it’s ‘leading’ to rhyme with ‘bedding’, rather than ‘beading’. Its technical name, leading, actually refers to thin strips of lead metal which were used to separate the lines of text. Line spacing theory dates back to the earliest days of manual typesetting on printing presses. ![]()
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