The “let’s reinvent basic fundamentals of the way our culture works and it will be The Future” complex has recently struck again. Last time I talked about this I think it was something about predicting the future, part 8.4 trillion. In that case, it was about a study done on how futurists thought the future was going to be like, the consensus being that the future would be more like science fiction—which is either absurd or blindingly obvious, depending on your point of view.

This time around it’s a little bit different. It’s something akin to English spelling reform—a topic which is no less ridiculous, but which I don’t have space or inclination to elaborate on here. As a movement, spelling reform has politely stayed out of the limelight. What we have currently sparking interest on Teh Interwebs is something called Live Ink.

The idea behind Live Ink is that there’s a better way to lay type out on the page than in block text, as this page is. The eye sees detail in a small spot right in the center of one’s field of vision, much like looking through a straw—but all our written material is in lines which doesn’t take advantage of the full “sight area” of the eye. A page of text, like this one, is oppressive. There must be a better way. There might be a better way. It’s not Live Ink.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Live Ink website yet, go ahead and do that. They have a short demo on the front page where you can see what’s actually going on here. The block text has been broken down into shorter lines, generally two or three words per line, and indented in such a way as to reflect sentence structure hierarchy. The idea behind this is that it allows the eye to move more quickly over the page, better understand complex sentence constructions, and retain more information. Sounds great.

“Look at the pull quote, for cryin’ out loud. That’s exactly what it is.”The first thing to note about Live Ink is that graphic designers have been doing this for, well, hundreds of years. Look at the pull quote, for cryin’ out loud. That’s exactly what it is. Same thing with headlines and giant ad copy. This is all the same thing that Live Ink is doing: a few words per line, large, easy to read. That’s done for a few reasons: 1) theoretically the headline or pull quote contains some important or interesting bit to pull you into the article and B) it breaks up huge depressing blocks of text and makes the page more interesting. Look, graphic designers know blocks of text can be depressing. That’s why textbooks and newspapers contain charts and graphs and doodads: so your brain doesn’t shut down when you view the page. Newspapers are at a fourth grade level already. Since they evidently can’t go higher than this without losing a significant portion of their audience, it makes sense to break the whole thing up with graphics and photos, too. Newspaper layout is a testament to short attention spans.

[Footnote: the Not A Blog™ is purposely not going overboard with this kind of stuff. Sometimes I have graphics, and I’ve recently implemented pull quotes, but I’m really about content. I like to think that if you slog through my paragraphs of depressing type that you’ll be rewarded with some interesting information. Also, it purposely limits my audience because those short attention span people who don’t sit still enough to read through all this aren’t necessarily the audience I want anyway. If you’ve made it this far, I value your opinion.]

Okay, so we recognize that block type can be oppressive, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s possible to set copy in a seriffed font with large counters and a lot of leading—all of which make type easier to read. But even disregarding all this stuff, block text still has another redeeming benefit, otherwise newspapers and books would be set in this pull-quote-esque Live Ink format already. This benefit is pretty self evident: it’s a lot more efficient to present information in small lines of type. You can fit more info in a small space. It doesn’t make the newspaper weigh 14 pounds.

But now that so much stuff is on computers, the “saving ink and space” argument doesn’t hold water. Webpages can be formated pretty much however you want them to be, and so it’s time to start exploring alternatives. Let’s Live-Ink it.

The second thing you might notice about Live Ink is that it looks rather like a poem. Odd line breaks, irregular line length, indents. But what one must ask is: why are poems set this way? Poems with a definite meter and rhyme have line breaks set up at the end of the meter or to emphasize the rhyme. Poems which do not have these devices, or use them sporadically, however, are still set in broken-line format. Why? Why not just set your poem in block text? There’s a reason.

The reason is cadence. The reason is the same reason as why I chose to put a paragraph break between “there is a reason” and “the reason is cadence”. A line break forces a pause. In the case of the end of the preceding paragraph and the beginning of this one, it adds just a smidgen of tension because I tell you a reason exists, but I don’t reveal it until after I’ve forced you to pause. Line breaks at the end of a line serve a useful purpose in poetry: the force the reader to stop, and without punctuation, no less. Unfortunately, when presenting someone with a continuous flow of information, this constant pause-start is not only unnecessary and annoying, it’s counterproductive.

Line breaks are the visual equivalent of using ellipsises. The ellipsis indicates that there’s more to come, but it still forces a pause greater than a period. You’ve seen this if you’ve ever had the displeasure of emailing back and forth with someone whose only method of punctuation is the ellipsis. The line breaks…caused by inserting…an ellipsis…where it doesn’t belong…cause one to read…as if they…were using…Live Ink technology…but highlight clearly…the difficulty…of reading…such a passage.

Live Ink introduces line breaks which mentally slow down a reader. Fair enough; this could be contributing to the increased comprehension they claim. The problem is that it punishes experienced readers by forcing them to bop along at a slower pace. The problem is exacerbated by the next thing Live Ink does: unpredictable line length and unpredictable line start.

Take a look at the copy in any professionally set book—or any newspaper, for that matter. The copy is justified. The copy in the Not A Blog™ is justified, also, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Sure, it looks neat and tidy compared to ragged right, but it serves another purpose. It defines to the reader a precise line length that they can count on no matter where in the book they are. Page 4? Page 39? Page 672? Every line will be between ten and fifteen words and exactly x inches long. The ten to fifteen word line is important, too, because it means the average reader will pause with their eyes between five and seven times (sometimes more, depending on if there is a new name being introduced, or something more complex than common words). Over hundreds of years of professional typesetting, this has emerged as an ideal. Surely not a coincidence? Surely not.

The reason for this is because it sets a definite rhythm. It takes a minimum count of three to establish synchronization (i.e. when trying to get a group of people to pull in unison), so you’d like a line of at least three eye beats so the reader can establish a rhythm which becomes transparent to the act of visually acquiring the information. But at the same time, you don’t want the line to be too long because that makes it difficult to zip back to the beginning of the next line down. It turns out that approximately six beats works out pretty well. In most cases, this is how many times an average to experienced reader will pause with their eyes as they read across the line. (Incidentally, someone who reads every word never learned to read properly, although through no fault of their own.) So you hit a rhythm of about five “beats” per line, and when you reach the end of the line, you can immediately zip back to the beginning of the next line because all the lines are of exactly the same physical length, but not so long that you lose track of vertical spacing.

Live Ink does not allow this. In order to increase comprehension, it does two things: shortens the line to a maximum of two beats per line, although often one will suffice, and it indents lines to various degrees. Now an experienced reader has two problems—they will overshoot the line when reading it, striving to hit their “rhythm”, but running out of words—and zipping back to the next line, they’ll often overshoot that, too, because the next line doesn’t always start in the same place as the previous one. The indented lines do not “guide the eye from row to row” as they claim, because you’re not looking for the beginning of the next line until you’re ready to go there. Most people go back to where the previous line started. Whether or not that’s where the Live Ink line starts is completely hit-or-miss. It’s not “guiding the eye” at all. Combined with the forced-pause line breaks, this makes any given passage set with Live Ink technology frustratingly imprecise for the experienced reader.

Finally, although Live Ink talks about how we see in a “straw-like” area, it doesn’t actually address this in the way it sets its type. Indeed, it uses the same line-by-line approach used in traditional typesetting. Although the lines are shorter, you still can’t focus on more than one at a time. You’re not reading three lines at a glance and moving to the next three. The folks behind Live Ink deride traditional typesetting as being “distracting”, because the lines above and below encroach into the line you’re trying to read. Aside from the fact that if type is properly set, this is not an issue, Live Ink does the same thing! You have a line above and below, and the reader is still only reading one line at a time. They spend all this time busting on how block type doesn’t take advantage of the eye’s straw-like field of view, but then Live Ink doesn’t take advantage of it either!

Yet another problem with the whole thing is that breaking up sentences in this way eliminates larger formatting which holds together a document. There are no paragraphs in Live Ink, as the breaks between word groupings indicate a new sentence, not a new paragraph. But paragraphs are no less important in the structuring and comprehension of a document than the sentences which make them up. An astute reader will skim, reading the first and last line of each paragraph to catch highlights without needing to invest themselves in going through every sentence. Live Ink doesn’t allow this, as it strips paragraph formatting from the text. In practice such organization could be indicated with a double line space, or some other mark, but scrolling through so much spaced-out text makes skimming much more difficult. Perhaps this is the point; when you’re forced to read every sentence, I suppose it would be that you’d pick up more. But it also makes it more difficult to jump to a particular part in the text.

I think it’s too early to say that this is actually an improvement over anything we have now, especially web page formatting. Still, I don’t think it’s going to catch on—and certainly not in its current incarnation. A comparison can be made here between Live Ink and the Center High Mount Stop Lamp.

The Center High Mount Stop Lamp is the third brake light cars have centered in the rear window or high on the body. This has been mandatory for all vehicles in the US since 1987. A study was done indicating that the presence of this light decreased rear-end fender benders by 50% since it was more noticeable. It started appearing on cars at which point, incidences of rear-end collisions went down. For a few years. Currently they’re back up around pre-1987 levels, and recent studies have indicated that they actually reduce fender benders by about 5%—a statistically negligible figure. Interestingly enough, there’s talk of legislation now to make it mandatory that all cars have a strip that spans the entire rear of the vehicle, since recent studies have show that this can decrease rear end collisions by about—you guessed it—50%.

Well, what happened? That’s easy; the newness wore off and everyone got used to seeing that third eye back there and before you know it, fender-benders were just as common. The novelty factor of the third rear brake light is what caused a 50% decrease in fender-benders, not the fact that the light was extra visible, or in the driver’s line of sight, or what have you. If they implement a rear brake light strip, the same thing is going to happen. A few years of diminished rear-end accidents before they return to the level where they were before.

This is what we’ll see with Live Ink. It’s such a new and novel concept reading comprehension is certainly going to be increased—for a few years. Then students are going to get used to the novel computer screen text formatting and comprehension is going to go right back to where it was. The formatting of the text itself is, I believe, no better than block formatting, and potentially worse. It’s just different right now, which gives it something of an edge.

But I think there’s one thing that’s more telling than anything else I’ve written here. Walker Reading Technologies—the company behind Live Ink—has spent a great deal of time and money telling everyone how great their product is. It increases comprehension. It’s easier on the eyes. It’s so fantastic, it changes the whole paradigm of reading.

They don’t use it.

Their very own website does not use Live Ink formatting. Why? It’s digital; it’s not any harder to format the text on their own website in visual-syntactic style than block text style—they’ve made this point in their own report. It’s so great! Why aren’t you using it on your own dang website?

Are you afraid that no one will take the website seriously if the text looks like a poem? Are you afraid people won’t read it? Or maybe you just didn’t think about it? Is it too new and novel that it’s not “proper” for a professional web front? If all digital media can benefit from this new and novel formatting, why aren’t you taking the first step with your web presence?

Whatever your reason is for not practicing what you preach, Walker Reading Technologies, it demonstrates a lack of confidence in your product. Why is it good enough for schools, but not good enough for you?

-Ted