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In
typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...
, a column is one or more vertical blocks of
content Content or contents may refer to: Media * Content (media), information or experience provided to audience or end-users by publishers or media producers ** Content industry, an umbrella term that encompasses companies owning and providing mas ...
positioned on a page, separated by gutters (vertical whitespace) or rules (thin lines, in this case vertical). Columns are most commonly used to break up large bodies of text that cannot fit in a single block of text on a page. Additionally, columns are used to improve page composition and readability. Newspapers very frequently use complex multi-column layouts to break up different stories and longer bodies of texts within a story. Column can also more generally refer to the vertical delineations created by a typographic grid system which type and image may be positioned. In
page layout In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives. The high-level page layout involves deciding on the ...
, the whitespace on the outside of the page (bounding the first and last columns) are known as margins; the gap between two facing pages is also considered a gutter, since there are columns on both sides. (Any gutter can also be referred to as a margin, but exterior and horizontal margins are not gutters.) In some cases, column numbers are provided to improve specifying the in-source location in addition to or in absence of page numbers in
serial publication In publishing and library and information science, the term serial is applied to materials "in any medium issued under the same title in a succession of discrete parts, usually numbered (or dated) and appearing at regular or irregular intervals wi ...
s, legal documents and
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
s. Historically, column designations were abbreviated "c" (singular) or "cc" (plural), i.e. "c130" or "cc130–136".


Typographic style

Column width is traditionally called ''measure'' by typesetters. For best legibility, typographic manuals suggest that columns should be wide enough to contain roughly 60 characters per line. One formula suggests multiplying the point size of the font by 2 to reach how wide a column should be in picas — in effect a column width of 24  ems. Following these guidelines usually results in multiple narrow columns being favored over a single wide column. Historically, books containing predominantly text generally have around 40 lines per column. However, this rule of thumb does not apply to more complex text that contain multiple images or illustrations, footnotes, running heads, folios, and captions. Column contrast refers to the overall color or greyness established by the column, and can be adjusted in a number of ways. One way is to adjust the relationship between the width and height of the column. Another way is to make adjustments to the
typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...
, from choosing a specific font, to adjusting weight, style, size and
leading In typography, leading ( ) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies. In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to incr ...
. Column contrast can be used to establish hierarchy, to balance the page composition, and to visually activate areas of the page.


Web layout

In
web design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...
, columns are often used to separate primary content from secondary and tertiary content. For example, a common two column layout may include a left column with navigation links, and a right column for body text. One method of creating columns for the web is to place text within an
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...
table element, often with the border set to zero. However, this method is considered outdated and inaccessible to some. Another method includes using
CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...
to either float or position the corresponding text. These methods were not as straightforward as using HTML tables, which made a tableless three column layout a sort of holy grail once these techniques were discovered in the early 2000s. More recent levels of CSS have addressed column behaviors, and web browser support for these behaviors continues to improve.
"caniuse.com" Accessed 2012-05-16.


See also

*
Column inch A column inch was the standard measurement of the amount of content in published works that use multiple columns per page. A column inch is a unit of space one column wide by high. A newspaper page Newspaper pages are laid out on a grid that co ...
*
stick Stick or the stick may refer to: Thin elongated objects * Twig * The weapon used in stick fighting * Walking stick, a device to facilitate balancing while walking * Shepherd's crook * Swagger stick * Digging stick * Swizzle stick, used to sti ...
, roughly of a column * Characters per line, referring to monospaced text *
Line length In typography, line length is the width of a block of typeset text, usually measured in units of length like inches or points or in characters per line (in which case it is a measure). A block of text or paragraph has a maximum line length t ...


Notes


References

* Carter, Rob. Day, Ben. Meggs, Philip. ''Typographic Design: Form and Communication'' 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons: 1993. pp. 51–53, 90–91. * * Romano, Frank J. ''The TypeEncyclopedia''. R. R. Bowker Company: 1984. pp. 86–86. {{Typography terms Typography Page layout