On 05/05/2010 12:57 PM, Scott Eldredge wrote:
> I received the following question from the folks in our Graduate Studies office:
> 
> "We have had a request from a faculty member to change the ETD policy to have the documents use single spacing instead of double spacing.  We are willing to consider this but I wonder if you could point me to places where I could find recommendations and best practices for reading digital documents."
> 
> Does anyone out there have any advice on this?  Do any of your institutions allow single spacing in ETDs?


Pica-sized Courier or Letter Gothic marching across 6 inches of paper, in
scholarly (or at least lengthy) paragraphs, single spaced, makes for
pretty dense text, and its easy to lose what line you're on.  So the
double-spacing convention was appropriate for typewritten papers if you
couldn't assume a student's typewriter had a line-and-a-half spacing
option.  That's unlikely to be a concern now: proportional fonts are
generally more readable with close settings than monospaced fonts.

IMO a good choice of font will bring with it a good default line height
for paragraphic text.  If you're dealing with more than a few sub- or
superscript characters, you might want to increase the line height by 25%
to 50%.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
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