Document Formatting

I have probably written about this before, but I want to say it again before I completely forget about it. Why can't we have documents formatted for the computer screen?

Blogger, for instance, does a nice job of formatting a page to fit the width of the screen, but it does nothing about the height. Of course, screen widths come in a variety of sizes, so something that will fit completely on one screen is going to be too tall or long for a narrower screen. Still, I would like to see some attempt made to deal with this. Pictures get cut in the middle. You have to scroll down some variable amount to be able to see the whole picture. You shouldn't have to do this. There is a reason God (or IBM) made the Page-Down key: that is so you can move to the next screen of data as efficiently as possible.

The way text is cut is sloppy at best, but I can usually pick up where I left off when I scroll down by one screen's worth. However, when I get to the end of the document, I am often lost, because the last bit of text is not a whole screen's worth, and I have no idea how much the text scrolled up. Was it one line or 20? So I have to search for the place I left off. If you get a command to scroll up one screen, scroll up one screen. Do not scroll up three lines and say here's your page. If there isn't enough text, fill the rest of space with nothing. Make it easy to find my place.

While I am complaining, let's talk about manual slide shows, the ones where you have to click on the "next" button to see the next picture. That is all fine and well, if you do NOT have to reposition the page each time in order to be able to see the picture. Google's Picasa does a good job of this. You can also embed a Picasa slide show in a web page. I don't like this so much because it starts the show as soon as it is loaded. Don't be doing that. Wait until I say to start.

And then there are the people who make web pages that are a thousand pictures long. They never finish loading, and what's worse for me is that they lock up my computer. They lock it up so bad I have to kill the power to get control back. Break up your web pages folks. They don't need to be more than two or three screens long. If your reader decides from the very first screen that this isn't the page he is looking for, there is no reason to load the next 500 pages. That's the reason I cut my blog posting size from 7 entries to 3 when I realized I was starting to use more pictures.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.