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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I am fine with just considering hyphenation a thing of the past. Do we really think it adds value? I find it far easier to read text that doesn't break words in half.

So what if the right margin is a bit raggedy.

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Respectively: that's your perogative; yes; cool; typesetting matter, sometimes drastically, even if most of the time you don't even notice it.

I have several "books" on the web, for which hyphenation is a godsend, especially as CSS is not just for that computer monitor you're staring at, but also for `media="print"`, which yes: matters even in 2019.

Ok, well I personally find them a bit jarring, after years of mostly reading on the web where they are extremely rare.

I remember typing papers on manual typewriters and having to think about where to hyphenate (as well as just when to do a carriage return), and it was awful. Admittedly now it is more of an aspect of reading (since an algorithm can do the actual hyphenation), but still. I would prefer we just abandon it.

Could explain why it matters more on a printed page that on a monitor? I don't see any relevant differences.

No, but therein lies the crux. You don't see any relevant differences, but there are billions of people who aren't you, and a good portion of them are what people who don't care about ragged vs perceived aligned edges call "a bit OCD" (even though of course it has nothing to do with OCD). They prefer nice, clean typesetting and layout, and enough of them are disturbed by ragged edges in "not novels" to not even bother reading more than a page. That's eyeballs, and opinions, lost over a typographical feature.

So for me, if the choice is between "maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership" (on what are already niche topics; how many people can possible care about Bezier curves, for instance) and "justify the content, with hyphenation because holy shit justified text looks bad without it" and not lose that readership, it's a no-brainer.

Because that's primarily what you use it for: you use hyphenation in combination with justified text to make sure that the number of words per line of text end up in the 14~16 range, without crazy longs gaps in sentences that are forced to move words like "reconfiguration" or "interoperability" to the next line because they're not allowed to hyphenate them. Back in the typewriter days, with fixed letter spacing and separate pointsize discs/balls, that was an absolute dire chore: 100% agreed that if at all possible, back then ragged edges were the way to go.

But the moment we got decent automated layout management through LaTeX (while plain TeX worked, it was also horrible) and these days XeLateX, and later on HTML+CSS, the "chore" part disappeared. You simply write your text, you turn on auto-hyphenation, and you don't give it a second thought until someone goes "hey this sentence looks really off", and then you fix that one sentence.

And then for novels, keep things ragged. The readership's used to it. But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are, not just where you're comfortable.

"maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership"

Uhhh, really? Love to see the A-B test. Or anyone who is so "disturbed" by ragged edges that they'll stop reading and is willing to speak up about it. Sorry, but I think you are making that up. That is an absurd claim.

"But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are"

Web content has been mostly without hyphenation for 20+ years. People ARE used to it.

(If you think I'm a kid with no concept of design: I'm 55 years old, have a degree in design, and was doing bezier and b-spline curves starting in the mid 80s)

I have to agree. Sounds like a lot of people here like it, but I find it confusing.

One example I see on this page is "be-fore", In my head it is "be. fore." and suddenly this word seems to have a lot more emphasis than it ought to have. And I also get distracted when it's unclear if a word was intentionally hyphenated or just auto-hyphenated. Maybe just the way that some of us process text.

This is down to practice. Most people who spent a few years reading books and newspapers stop noticing the hyphenation at all.

Maybe true, but for whatever reason they haven't been used much on the web, and I think the lack of hyphenation has proved itself to be preferable.

Sure, you can practice and learn to get used to it (the first half of my life there was no web, so I certainly did), but why should you have to? YOU CaN gEt usED To tHIS as wELl, wiTh somE PRActICE.

I'd like to see a study that actually measures reading speed and comprehension with and without.

Here's a good example of a place where having right justification was important for aesthetics, but they still chose not to hyphenate (presumably because it is just ugly): https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

It adds considerable value if the goal is not more than getting some words on the screen" but rather "how is the best way I can possibly present this textual document."

Personally, I find a very small proportion of text to fall into the latter category. But for those that do, clean presentation is huge.

Could you give me an example of a type of document that falls into that latter category?

Personally I don't think they make it look cleaner, but the opposite.

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