Notes on Quantum Mechanics
graybits.biz
graybits.biz
However, on my screen, called 14", about 12.5" wide, the text is about 100 characters per line in about 7.5" for about 13.33 characters per inch horizontally.
Then with two pair of strong reading glasses and my nose 5" from the screen, I can barely read the text.
A shame because about half the width of the screen is given over to just a table of contents with mostly blank space.
Maybe if I had a video screen 4 feet wide?
More generally, yes, I know, there is a lot of careful, sophisticated, deep work in user interface, but for the OP pages I'd like to see only about 60 characters per line and about 6 characters per inch horizontally. About 8 characters per inch is my upper limit.
Sure if my screen were twice as wide, then I could get the present 13 characters per inch down to 7.5, but these days with laptops and tables, screens 25" inches wide are not near the 'median'.
13 characters per inch I just can't read without a lot of effort.
Generally, in Web screens, we are free to use about all the length we want but should be very careful about using up screen width.
In my start-up, each screen is just 800 pixels wide with high contrast and large fonts, about 25 pixels high on lines 35 pixels high.
Here I'd like to encourage Web page designers to use larger fonts, narrower pages, and fewer characters per line.
And I prefer the exact opposite, and neither of us are wrong.
I just thought I'd get that out of the way before the usual flame war erupts, and the "your preference is objectively bad" brigade comes out citing "laws" and "studies" and "You must be just like the small group we tested on, you just don't know what you like" and so on.
It's pretty bad.
"No. It doesn't wrap or flow. Wrapping and flowing messes up the design I created. Everything should be pixel-perfect with how it is on my Mac."
Then you post an ad-hominem and ignore any evidence that this site breaks the web. Bravo.
Fine with me, but here I'm not trying for anything subtle or artistic: I just want to be able to read the darned text.
My suggestion of <= 60 characters per line is closer to what newspapers long preferred. My suggestion of only about 6 characters per inch horizontally on the screen is due partly to my eyes no longer being 20 years old, but really tiny fonts get fuzzy on a screen 12.5" wide with 1024 x 768 pixels.
I'd be glad to have any other situation, including the one you prefer, if I could just read the darned text.
I confess, I just tweaked my favorite text editor to give me 62 characters, bold, in 9" horizontally, and I like it much better than before. So, that's 6.88 characters per inch horizontally on the screen, can clearly see the difference between a comma and a period, etc.
For some Web pages, I just copy the text to the system clipboard, pull it into my favorite text editor, re-flow the text back to about 60 characters per line, and just read the stuff easily.
But for this piece on quantum mechanics, I guessed that there would be enough in math notation that my copy, paste, and re-flow into my 8 bit ASCII text editor wouldn't work.
I'd enjoy reading the quantum mechanics if I could read the text.
But, really, it doesn't hurt to use larger fonts -- just use more space vertically. Don't try to make so much use of the horizontal dimension -- that's the one that is more constrained. Or, when reading, it's easy to scroll down but a pain to scroll left and right once for each line read, when the scrolling is available.
If have lines with no more than 60 characters, then Ctrl+ can adjust the font size, and horizontal scrolling can put the 60 characters all on the visible screen at the same time -- then just scroll down as read.
For good UI/UX, mostly I don't care; instead I just want to be able to use the Web page and, in particular, read the text.
However, I am reading the first part of the first section (explaining the basis vectors of a linear space), and see this:
http://i.imgur.com/Qizuw0K.png
That makes no sense to me, shouldn't it be more like this?
http://i.imgur.com/iKpKgSa.png
Maybe I am just not familiar with the notation, though...
BTW, |u> = u_i |e_i> would be the correct equation in Einstein notation where the u_i |e_i> would be a contraction in which the summation along repeated indices is implicit. When you're dealing with a lot of tensor multiplication this notation is very useful because of its clarity and compactness.
I was more excited about the content and getting that right that I just didn't test the layout before posting (I have large monitors so my defaults were not geared toward small screen sizes). I had an eye exam today so I could literally only now see these comments since my pupils were dilated.
I hope you can now get to some of the quantum mechanics stuff.