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font-size is a command-line utility that tells gives you the best font size to use based on your font preference, your viewing distance, and your screen’s resolution.

About This Repository

This repository is a part of the Byte-Sized JavaScript VideoCasts.

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            »»  bytesized.tv  ««

Byte-Sized What?!

Byte-Sized JavaScript.

It is a compilation of short (around ten minutes) monthly screencasts about JavaScript and related technologies.

About font-size

font-size is a command-line utility that tells gives you the best font size to use based on your font preference, your viewing distance, and your screen’s resolution.

Note that having a 10-minute walk every couple of hours will also help you protect your eyes (and sanity); and as a side benefit you won’t have eye strains regardless of how tiny your font preference is.

But you know yourself, don’t you? — When you are “in the zone” time dilates, and one earthling day feels like ten minutes to you. — But, not (necessarily) to your body.

font-size will convince you to bump up your font-size a notch, so that you won’t have to consume Advils like jelly beans when you come back from “the zone” to the real world.

How “Scientific” is This?

Well, so far (it works for me)™ :).

I’ve read a bunch of papers and meta-studies about text readability(one of them is cited, inside the source code — see ./lib/config.js). — The problem is: None of the studies that I’ve found target digital screens. I’ve tried to adjust values based on a few facts:

• Programmers use monotype type faces, which are designed to be readable in smaller font-sizes than a typical serif font like “Times New Roman”.
• Modern displays have good enough resolution; so reading a text on a Retina display should be a fairly similar experience to reading the same text at the same distance and size on paper.

To me, it gave fairly accurate results. Though, please file an issue if you think the settings can be adjusted to give better results (see ./lib/config.js for the configuration options).

Also, please shoot me an email if you find an article or study that covers the effect of typeface and font x-height ratio regarding readability and eye fatigue.

Can You Be More Specific, Please?

The “x-height critical size” of a text that you are reading, in other words, the minimum size that the text is still legible is about 4.5 points at 16’’, or about 0.2° of visual arc, for readers with 20/20 vision.

For older readers, this increases to 0.3° (~6 point); for those with much older and less flexible eyes, it rises to as much as 1.0° (~20 pts).

The lesson to learn here is that, the exact font size and shape that feels comfortable depends on many factors including, age, eyesight, and personal preference (there even are people who love to code with “Comic Sans MS”, for example)

I’ve created this app to suit for a normalized used case.

Also note that:

• Each font will have a different x-height.
• x-height is not the only thing that increases the font’s readability. A narrow font with a high x-height can be less readable than a wider font with relatively lower x-height.
• Certain people (*people with astigmatism, dyslexia…) feel more comfortable with certain kinds of fonts regardless of the font’s x-height ratio.
• The angle you look at the screen also affects your visual arc. The code simplifies the computation by assuming that you are directly looking at the screen; which is the case most of the time anyway.

Additionally, the article that I cited talks about print size. — 72 points on paper is 1 inches; that’s a fact, and it does not change.

One other thing is: Although almost all operating systems assume that your monitor has a 96 pixels-per-inch resolution, your display may have higher or lower pixels per physical ruler inch. — Which means 96 computer pixels, which is 1 computer inches, may not be 1 physical-world ruler inch. — To make the math simpler, the algorithm in this app calculates font sizes in pixels instead of points. — If you need a point font-size instead; it should be relatively easy to convert.

Can I configure it for my taste?

font-size assumes perfect vision, or perfectly adjusted vision (i.e. corrective lenses).

Your adjusted vision might be less-than-perfect due to many factors, age being one of them.

Currently the only way to configure font-size is through forking it and changing the visual arc degrees in ./lib/config.js.

I know that’s not ideal. — Please create a pull request if you want to let those values to be configurable externally (say, by reading an external config file).

Installation

Install using NPM:

npm install -g font-size

Usage Examples

The font-size API is simple; you provide your distance to the screen (in inches — sorry rest of the world), the x-height ratio of your preferred font, and your screen resolution (in PPI); and font-size gives you some recommendations:

font-size --distance 28 --x-height .53 --resolution 110

    For your typeface, the minimum legible font size is 19px
        (you don’t want to hurt your eyes, do you?).

    Your text is nicely readable starting from… 22px;

    however, anything beyond 27px will damage readability.

If you are a laptop user, on average, your eyes will be 23’’ from the monitor. Let’s change the distance to see what font-size recommends:

font-size --distance 23 --x-height .53 --resolution 110

    For your typeface, the minimum legible font size is 16px
        (you don’t want to hurt your eyes, do you?).

    Your text is nicely readable starting from… 18px;

    however, anything beyond 22px will damage readability.

Fair enough. And you generally hold your tablet around 14’’ from your eyes. Let’s recalculate with adjusted distance, using an Apple iPad Mini at 163 dpi:

font-size --distance 14 --x-height .53 --resolution 163

    For your typeface, the minimum legible font size is 14px
        (you don’t want to hurt your eyes, do you?).

    Your text is nicely readable starting from… 17px;

    however, anything beyond 20px will damage readability.

I Need Help

You may use --help flag to get help:

font-size --help

Dependencies

You will need the current version of Node.JS with all the bells and whistles — You can install it from nodejs.org.

font-size is self-sufficient; all of its dependencies will be fetched during install time. — You can look at package.json to glance over the dependencies.

Package Scripts

Here are the helper npm scripts that you can run via npm:

• npm test: Executes the unit tests.
• npm run lint: Checks whether the source JavaScript is well-formed.

Important Files and Folders

• ./index.js: The main entry point.
• bin: Scripts that are mostly used by npm.
• CHANGELOG.md: A log of what has been done since the last version.
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md: Tells the collaborators to be nice to each other.
• README.md: This very file.
• .eslintrc: Used for development; configures eslint.
• .travis.yml: Used for CI; configures Travis.

Wanna Help?

Any help is more than appreciated.

If you want to contribute to the source code, fork this repository and create a pull request.

In lieu of a formal style guide, take care to maintain the existing coding style.

Also, don’t forget to add unit tests for any new or changed functionality.

If you want to report a bug; or share a comment or suggestion, file an issue.

I’ve Found a Bug; I Have an Idea

For bug reports and suggestions, please file an issue.

Contact Information

• Project Maintainer: Volkan Özçelik
• Project Website: bytesized.tv

License

MIT-licensed. — See the license file for details.

Code of Conduct

We are committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of the level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, or nationality.

See the code of conduct for details.