Word 97—Online

Reading

Online documents are becoming increasingly common with the prevalence of email and the web. You now spend a lot of time browsing and navigating documents online – subsequently, you need efficient means to quickly find and read relevant information. Word 97 provides a rich set of tools to enhance your online reading and navigational experience.

Online Layout View

What works best for reading physical printed pages is often different from what’s best for reading online – for example, it is useful to see recurring headers and footers on printed output, but not as useful in the online case. Word now provides a new view optimized for on screen reading. Normal view is tailored for efficient editing, Page Layout shows you exactly how your printed output will look, and Outline view lets you easily manage structured documents. Online Layout View is tailored to get the best screen display of your documents:

• Optimized line length – Research shows that optimal line width for legibility is approximately 60-70 characters per line. Online Layout view restricts your column width to display an average of 66 characters per line. The fixed column width also aids online authoring since it guarantees a constant line width across various displays and platforms.

• Enlarged fonts and increased leading to improve legibility – typically, font size is optimized to look great for printed output. This size is usually too small to read comfortably on the screen. In Online Layout view, Word scales fonts to at least 12 points to make your document more readable online.

• Page height based on window size – Online Layout View lays out pages based on a new virtual page size that in turn is based on the document window size. The page is designed to preserve 66 characters per lines at the best font size. Page breaks are not indicated on the screen but Word creates constant width margins to make the online page easy to read.

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