Have you ever seen a long text on a billboard? I guess not.

swid · on Sept 25, 2022

I'm pretty sure you misunderstood what I wrote.

> there’s a difference between number of characters and width

Billboards use large letters to fill the space, but normally they would be readable on a business card.

ocimbote · on Sept 25, 2022

Fair enough. But your point requires discussing nonetheless.

You seem to suggest that fontsize should adapt to width to fill the space (seemingly to a billboard, as per your example).

If the billboard technique was used on the web, I guess we might not have more than a handful of lines on screen (on a 16:10 or so). That would disable skimming on long texts and even more, barely display a single paragraph (that's a gut guessing).

Plus, and more importantly, the distance to the screen is such that a font too big is not more readable. There's a tradeoff to he found for the fontsize that not only has to take into account the size of the screen but also the distance of the reader from the medium.

Or so I assume.