: How much control over line breaks should I exercise in a formal letter? How much control over line breaks should I exercise in a formal letter? I have a quote of the text of an email message,

@Nimeshi706

@Ovaryraptor has a solid answer with respect to print. I can't add much to that, other than to perhaps provide a little trick.... margins. If you find you've got several widows/orphans you don't want. Adjust the margins slightly rather than changing tracking/kerning for a single line/paragraph. A reader isn't really going to consciously acknowledge margins, but they may offer you some more room to play with line breaks.

For email...


If plain text: you can really only play with max column width. Many email client provide a "line wrap" or "Line length" or "column width" preference. It's usually denoted by a character count - i.e. "wrap text at 70 characters" This will basically hard wrap plain text at that set width. I generally use 80 characters and it's pretty good. If necessary you might consider dropping it to a slightly smaller character count to allow different wrapping on send. However, overall you shouldn't bee too concerned with line wraps in plain text emails. All email clients will read the plain text differently and you really can't control much once the email leaves your system.
For HTML emails you can use responsive type sizes setting a max width for columns and then using type sizes such as vh or vw (viewport height/viewport width) to adjust type sizes. More Info. Breaks can be a difficult issue. See here for a question regarding responsive line breaks. It's a few years old and sinc that time I've found the best practice for myself is to use <br class="break"> then use the class with display: none; to hide teh line breaks on smaller devices.

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@Angie364

For typesetting you almost NEVER break-up important things like:


Addresses
Names
Phone Numbers




For dealing with widows, orphans and line breaks, they will happen. You should try at all costs to avoid them but to work around breaking up important lines of text sometimes you must make sacrifices.

I would ensure that you are using the correct justification for your medium (probably should be left) and then work on your line length. You are looking for a nice long, short, long, short variation to break up the paragraph to be visually different which enhances readability.

As a golden rule you look for 9-12 words/line roughly.

In general, I would read up on general typography rules. This article goes over how to visually compose text nicely which should help you a lot.

The main take-away for your I think is this:


The final factor to take into account when deciding upon the
appropriate line length is the nature of the actual text. For
instance, some content – such as medical text – might involve many
longer words, lending itself to a wider column width to avoid
excessive hyphenations. On the other hand, text used for children and
young readers might involve many short words, allowing for a narrower
column.




For Email vs Print

In essence they operate mostly the same. You want to start off with the good base rules of good typography. After you have your base text set-up you can then test for responsiveness on mobile/web and alter your text with css using <br /> and <span>.

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