Line length is the cheapest readability upgrade

When text feels hard to read, the cause is usually not the font. It is the line length. Very long lines make your eye lose its place; very short lines break sentences into stutters. A measure of roughly 60 to 75 characters per line is the range most style guides converge on.

Why it works

A comfortable measure lets your eyes sweep to the end of a line and drop to the next without effort. Widen the measure and saccades overshoot; narrow it and rhythm breaks. This is also why increasing font size alone rarely fixes a cramped layout — the measure grows with it.

Check any page in thirty seconds

• Select one full sentence in the middle of a paragraph and count the characters, or estimate six characters per word.
• Look at the line height: text that nearly touches the line below needs more space.
• Resize the window: content should reflow, not demand horizontal scrolling.

The Clean Article Reader exposes these three controls directly, so you can tune them for a specific article before printing or sharing it.