Lt. Dish wrote:Now, speaking for myself, I ask for 1" margins all around to force students to use the entire page, avoiding "white-space abuse." WSA aids in spreading out the text in an attempt to "meet" minimum page requirements and is epidemic.
I can understand that as an educator you are looking to enforce a minimum effort from your students, and the control of whitespace on written documents is certainly part of that. The problem is that once one gets past being a student, to quote Yoda, “you must unlearn what you have learned.” The generous use of whitespace actually adds to the legibility of documents by keeping line length in optimal ranges. When I write memos to my colleagues, for example, I use left and right margins of 1.75”. Does that leave a lot of the page blank? Sure, but it also makes the document more readable. Once you get past the point where a teacher will scold you for doing so, people should use more whitespace, not less.
The United States Supreme Court, for example, has very good requirements for typography in its rules, and the documents issued by the court are generally compliant with professional-typography principles. Here’s a random opinion released by the Court. Note the use of whitespace and the fact that the document is not double-spaced:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11 ... 84c1d3.pdf
Also, this document is printed in New Century Schoolbook. I know that because it’s the official typeface of the Court. They use it for everything. In fact, under the Court’s rules, the text of document submitted to the Court “shall be typeset in a Century family (e. g., Century Expanded, New Century Schoolbook, or Century Schoolbook) 12-point type with 2-point or more leading between lines.” The Justices demand good typography in their court filings.