OddThinking

Revulsion?

In the old days the granularity was an entire character which could be added or removed to achieve justification. Nowadays, the pixel is the smallest level of granularity, for on-screen reading anyway. This is a lot better, but is still subject to readability problems, at least when compared to (say) a professionally-typeset printed page.

I think a bigger problem is that none of the browsers (which I am assuming is the trigger for this topic) do hyphenation, and hence rely on a lot more use of inserted spaces/pixels for full justification, and this AFAICT is the main reason to not use full justification on a web page.

Automatic hyphenation is hard, and TeX is the only layout engine that I’ve seen that even gets it vaguely right. So it’s no wonder the browsers don’t support it. Given this limitation, use of the soft hyphen would seem to be a good idea, but this has its own problems.

Disclaimer: IANAT(ypographer)

What Alastair said. If you don’t break words well, you occasionally end up with lines with 5-letter-wide word spaces.

Yes. Full justification in Word just plain old looks terrible. Tex looks professional by contrast. Incidentally, web browsers can generally get away with non-hyphenated justification for a very bad reason: They usually have a lot of words in a line, so the average spacing can be controlled pretty tightly.

Anyway, there’s little reason to not have auto-hyphenation as well as the “ft” thing.

Actually, I wasn’t talking about web-sites. I was talking about the printed page – include Word – but I’ll take the HTML challenge.

Let’s assume auto-hyphenation isn’t an option; it’s too hard to do; even TeX needs hints. I have hand-hyphenated before in short, high-profile documents, but it doesn’t scale.

Here is the same arbitrary passage (by H.G. Wells) in full-justification and left-align. Compare their appearance.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

Now, resize the browser window from the maximum until you are comfortable with the size of the spaces. Now take a typical line and count the characters (not spaces). Then grab a printed document that has a reasonably readable layout, and count the number of characters across the line.

My numbers where “Minimum width of about 60 characters” and “About 80 characters to a printed line”. This was only a quick test, but is suggests to me that, even reading online, justification isn’t going to suffer from huge large spaces and long “runs” (spaces lining up vertically).

That’s a pretty quick and dirty test. Where’s the science? Well, looking for the literature on readability and justification, I realised there is plenty of it out there, and what I saw was horribly contradictory – and often dated. It would take longer than I wanted to spend to sort it out.

Here are some random claims, to give you an idea:

Justified = Left Aligned, except for poor readers.
Justified > Left Aligned for comprehension.
Justified <= Left Aligned, for reading speed, except for when two columns are being read by faster readers.

Each of the references has a lot of other claims which make them somewhat interesting to browse.

Umm, those two passages are both left-aligned to me. And what does “resize the browser window from the maximum” mean?

Interesting references though, especially that last one.

“They’re justified and they’re ancient, and they drive an ice cream van”

Alastair,

I was working on fixing this, even as you posted. Done.

The phrase “resize the browser window from the maximum” is just a clumsy way of saying “resize your browser windows”. The idea is to determine what width is the minimum required to give the rendering engine enough leeway to avoid harsh spacing.