Talk:Writer/ToDo/Layout/View Concepts

In the current View concepts, the draft layout does not have margins. I think it should. There are two reasons for it and being a professional writer myself (not in English), I know they are surely valid indeed.

1. Readability of copy is heavily dependent on line length. In books the optimal length is 65 characters. This is due to the number of "eye fixation points" that the average reader prefers and is used to. If I read or write my own copy, I'd like maximal readability. So I set my margins to about 65 characters, which matches 13 cm (5 inches) per line using a 10 point sans-serif. Some people use different type fonts that are bigger or wider and they should be able to adjust the margin setting accordingly.

2. Even though I am just writing a draft, I feel comfortable knowing that the printed output will have the same line wraps and pagebreaks. That way I will not be confronted with ugly line wraps and orphans in the print version.

Of course, I checked if other writers agreed with me. The vast majority of them did. So, I think margin setting should be available in draft view. Maybe some people would like a check box in the Options settings to turn margins off, but I doubt that.

One View I missed in the View Concepts is the "Hide white space" view. This view is the Print View but the upper and lower margins (including headers and footers) are hidden. M$ Word has this feature and I like it a lot. Maybe it should not be considered a view on its own, but it certainly should be mentioned in View Concepts.

Thanks for thinking this over.