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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

I can't see rivers in the example. Here's a screenshot.

There's a river starting on line two "sentences." through the period in "habit." and down through the space to the right of "set" 'anymore." and "practice."

Considering that the placement of the words in the two examples is exactly the same, the "river" is present in both.

Nope. Visually it's not there in the first instance.

It absolutely is. If you want to argue it's not as large, that's fine, but it is definitely present.

http://imgur.com/DzrFAZU

I can only assume the text is supposed to be full justified. It's fairly hideous looking otherwise and it explains the bizarre hyphenation.

If you tweak the css (text-align: justify), 1-4 word sentences do stand out in a bad way.

Personally, I find the double-spaced version more readable.

Your browser most likely took this into account when doing the text layout. HTML & CSS don't specify algorithms for line-breaking, which the person who wrote that may not have realised.

In order to demonstrate the problem reliably, they would have had to use an image or PDF file. But the fact that your browser fixed it (as did mine) indicates that it's not actually a problem, since it can be solved automatically in software.

Some issues can be solved automatically in software, but that's like saying a sufficiently smart compiler can produce optimal machine code. It's true, but such software doesn't actually exist. There is still a lot of manual adjustment that goes on, especially in magazine layout, around headline kerning and text spacing issues to tweak the output from the algorithms.

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