Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Explain this Characters Per Line stuff for V-Print CR

A page is 8.5 inches wide. To make the numbers easy, if the font that you use, can fit ten characters per inch; you have 85 columns on one line.

Now we have to subtract margins, borders, and gutters from the 8.5 inches/85 columns. With left and right margins set to 1.5 inches each, you are down to 55 columns. Subtract borders and gutters and you are left with about 51 columns. As long as no line of text has more than this number of characters (including line numbers, timestamps and various spaces), there will be no wrapping of lines.

So the question is, how can I get more than about 50 characters per line.

First is number of characters per inch. This is determined by four factors.

1. First and most obvious is the font size. The larger the font size, the fewer characters per inch.
2. Next is a proportional font as compared to a non-proportional font. You can fit more characters per inch using a proportional font.
3. Not as obvious is font family. Some font families are simply larger than others. For instance, Garamond fits about 25% more characters per inch than Verdana.
4. Finally, bolded or not. Bolded text takes more space, yielding fewer characters per inch.

Second is size of your margins, simply reducing from 1.5 on each side to 1 inch per side adds ten characters per line.

Next would be borders. Not having borders allows that space to be used for text.

Finally, would be what goes on a line. Obviously, adding in timestamps decreases the amount of text that can be on the line.

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