Readers as text designers: Personalizing the layout of text

It is likely that, in the future, readers will be able to tailor screen-based and word-processed text to suit their own requirements and preferences in terms of typography and layout. This paper reports on what happened when students were given the freedom to re-space, and to use typographic cues to enhance the clarity of a piece of instructional text. The results showed that the students were not consistent in their use of spacing to show structure, and that they varied in how they used typographic cueing. It is concluded that more rigorous work along the lines reported here would be of interest.