Tightly packed lists — Typophile archive

Zach Rose11 August 2008 · 12:58

I'm wondering what to do about setting a long list in narrow columns when most of the list items are very short (FedEx), but some are very long (Middle East Studies Center of Portland State University). The list is some 600 items long. Wide columns would be lovely, but even at 8/9.5 Grotesque Light Condensed I haven't the space.

So far, indenting second lines seems like the best I can do. It's far cleaner than superfluous bullets or first line indents, but I'm not wild about it.

Anyone seen this done well lately?

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timd12 August 2008 · 06:23

The indented second line is a classic approach, it occurs to me that you could steal some leading and add some space between entries, possibly even a rule as well (in which case you wouldn't need to indent), the drawback with that would be a lack of aligning between columns, unless you could work a half line space in which might be too airy at the expense of useability.

Tim