What is the optimal text width for Speed Reading?

Question

Was reading here about this technique. From my POV it only works good with a distinct min-max text width. Columns in newspapers of a with of a few centimeters (5-6) seem quite good to me. I also like reading stackexchange sites or google groups with a limited text width/forced linebreaking. Old php, vbulletin boards adapt text width to screen width, which makes Speed Reading on widescreen displays impossible.

So what is the correct text min-max range. Are there tricks/addons like Stylish for Firefox www.userstyles.org that can adjust automatically the text width of main body text on websites, blogs,... via CSS to the optimal min-max width? On the stackexchange.com the textwidth is fixed and not changeable by decreasing window size. Imo 3/4 of current width would make it more optimal for speed reading.

Answer 1

Readability (http://www.readability.com) is a browser addon that reformat the text to a user preset font size, column width and colors. It also gets rid of surrounding distractions. You can use it and experiment what works best for you.

Answer 2

Just regarding pages where the text does adjust too much to the window size:
I sometimes actually pull pages into a separate browser window, where I can then adjust the window width to get lines to a readable width.
Opera allows (or at least used to allow, when I last used it years ago) individual tabs to be resized independently of the browser window.