The Line-Height Range Body Text Actually Needs
A developer sets body text at 16px with no explicit line-height,
so it renders at the browser default of roughly 1.2x.
Per this subject's eye-mechanics reasoning, what line-height range should 16px body text actually use?
The correct answer is "1.4-1.6x the font size."
Body text generally wants 1.4-1.6x the font size as its line-height — for 16px text, that's roughly 22-26px. This isn't a stylistic default; it's about giving the eye's saccade (the jump back to the start of the next line) enough vertical room to land correctly. At the ~1.2x browser default, lines crowd together and a reader can lose track of which line they just finished, re-reading or skipping one — a problem that compounds as line-length increases.
The distractors don't match the functional range: 1.0-1.1x is tighter than even the too-tight browser default, not a fix for it; 1.8-2.2x overshoots into the too-loose failure mode, where lines feel disconnected and stop reading as one paragraph; and "exactly 1.0x, matching the font size" describes single-spaced text with no leading at all, which is the crowding problem in its most extreme form, not a target to aim for.
Share this question