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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

My favorite feature of this package is how it expands/contracts letters so that hyphenation is almost entirely gone in a fully justified text. I personally hate the hyphenation of words: they sometimes create ambiguity (incidental hyphens at the end of a line vs hyphens in the original word) and the hyphenation points always seem unintuitive to me.

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Fun fact: in Polish typography, you repeat the hyphen at the beginning of the next line in the latter case (hyphenation when there is a hyphen already).

I should warn you that the stretch that the package performs does not preserve the vertical stem widths. Therefore, especially at small point sizes, there are perceptible weight changes.

In my opinion, the default font expansion value stretch=20 is not conservative enough. I would personally recommend not only reducing it but also using the selected argument to further reduce the expansion of glyphs whose geometry distortion may be more easily perceived.

Came here to say the same thing. Also, it pushes commas, full stops, and hyphens to hang over the margin. The typeset outcome is much more pleasant to the eye.

Hyphenation should not be dependent on justification? Meaning, it should be there or gone regardless of justification.

It's hard (impossible?) to justify narrow columns in a fashion which is pleasing to the eye if you don't hyphenate, unless you employ glyph squeezing/stretching techniques such as used by microtype.

Yes, but it doesn’t look much better left-aligned, you’d want to use hyphenation there as well.

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