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.