Experienced programmers know that a program can be more readily understood if it is well layed out with indentation, and even a little colour.
Users of UltraEdit asked the vendor to provide a "bird's eye view" of programming sources, so that they could easily find a part of the program they were maintaining. And this feature is now builtin.
But how often do you see a mathematics text that is badly formatted?
I have a book with wonderful sentences called Linear Algebra Done Right. Its only problem is that the page layout leaves a lot to be desired.
I'm only guessing here, but I suspect that good presentation of a mathematics text can
help someone understand the general flow of the exposition, because the mind remembers a map of the text and uses it to find its way around in the concepts.
So-called mind mapping software is obviously guided by this idea too.
It's time to do a little experimenting to corroborate this idea.
I'm also willing to speculate that finding the appropriate page layout is hard work, with lots of iterations.
