Hacker News Reader

Comment by brooke2k | Hacker News Reader

this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting

View on HN

One advantage in print; pages are often not entirely opaque. So on page 3, you see a bit of the text of page 2 shine through. If page 2 has a jagged right margin, this also makes the left margin of page 3 look uneven.

Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.

It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.

This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.

Differences are supposed to convey information. E.g. a paragraph's first line is indented to indicate that this is a start of a paragraph. Differences in line width convey no useful information, so the are suppressed. Same goes for overall text height on a page, although this rule is broken more often.

Typesetters are known to be very specific about small details. E. g. tables are typeset with meticulous alignment rules. It may look superfluous, but it is not. The nature of the craft is that it has to be invisible unless you know where to look.

I've never given this much thought, but I agree with you 100%.

After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".

For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.

Still super impressive that people do this though.

It's just neatness. Like ironing clothes or putting on a tie, it's not about it serving a functional purpose. It's just to show off straight lines.

I know, but it feels much more neat to me to have even spacing between words

People will bend over backwards to rationalize it but the actual explanation is quite simple: 16th-century typesetters saw it as beautiful, and a norm was born.

IIRC, the somewhat random allocation of trailing silent "e"s in English spelling can partly be explained by typesetters trying to fill lines.

Totally agree with you BTW. I find justification ugly as sin.

Fully justified text looks much better when it’s more narrow columns, especially multiple; full page width text is usually not the main use case

I guess in printed material it’s more space efficient, which is why it has historically been used. Justified text can be made look nice but it requires hyphenation and a non-greedy linebreaking algorithm, which unfortunately is not implemented in browsers or Microsoft Word.

Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com