Friday, February 08, 2008

Portrait vs. Landscape

In the last two days, I have downloaded three documents from the web for offline reading. These were PDFs clearly meant for offline reading. All three are in landscape (horizontal) layout. Coincidence? Could it be a trend? If it is a trend, where does it come from? Could it be that our reading habits are changing -- we're scanning rather than reading -- and document layouts need to adjust to the way our eyes and brains are now handling written materials? After all, the landscape layout more closely resembles the computer screen shape and allows for a two or three column format. Of course, you can put two or three columns in a portrait layout but it's easier on the eyes with a landscape layout.

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