4 ms·

I seem to remember that justification makes it harder to read much in the way all caps do. Ragged edges supposedly helps you stay in the right line when reading

I seem to remember that justification makes it harder to read much in the way all caps do. Ragged edges supposedly helps you stay in the right line when reading. Does anyone have any info on this?

jerf 16y ago
It is a "well-known fact" on the internet, based on my searching, but I couldn't find a definitive source on the matter, even though I'd swear I've seen one. (Perhaps I too am simply remembering the "well-known fact".) I even found several people asking for the definitive source and coming up empty. The best justification (no pun intended) for using "ragged text" I found was under the heading "Text Alignment" on http://community.infragistics.com/ux/articles/text-treatment-and-user-experience.aspx http://community.infragistics.com/ux/articles/text-treatment... . It is also my opinion that full justification may make the text block as a whole prettier but makes the text significantly harder to read. However, soft hypens and zero-width spaces still have a role to play on the web even so because justified and ragged-right text both have problems with very, very long words, and on the internet multi-hundred character words actually show up with some frequency, mostly as URLs.
- stan_rogers 16y ago
  I've heard the "line identification hypothesis" mentioned a few times in regards to preferring ragged-right, but I'm pretty sure that's just a guess. It seems readers do find fully-justified text harder to read on the web sometimes, but I'd be willing to bet that it has a lot more to do with column width, leading and word/letter spacing. (Without appropriate hyphenation, word spacing can vary greatly in justified text, especially when lines are short-ish and words are long-ish.) I've found that a good screen-purposed serif typeface set with extra leading (1.2 em seems to be about right) and a line length of 35-40 ems works very well as justified text for "publications". Decent automated hyphenation ought to make things a lot better.

I seem to remember that justification makes it harder to read much in the way all caps do. Ragged edges supposedly helps you stay in the right line when reading. Does anyone have any info on this?

jerf 16y ago

It is a "well-known fact" on the internet, based on my searching, but I couldn't find a definitive source on the matter, even though I'd swear I've seen one. (Perhaps I too am simply remembering the "well-known fact".) I even found several people asking for the definitive source and coming up empty. The best justification (no pun intended) for using "ragged text" I found was under the heading "Text Alignment" on http://community.infragistics.com/ux/articles/text-treatment-and-user-experience.aspx http://community.infragistics.com/ux/articles/text-treatment... . It is also my opinion that full justification may make the text block as a whole prettier but makes the text significantly harder to read. However, soft hypens and zero-width spaces still have a role to play on the web even so because justified and ragged-right text both have problems with very, very long words, and on the internet multi-hundred character words actually show up with some frequency, mostly as URLs.

stan_rogers 16y ago
I've heard the "line identification hypothesis" mentioned a few times in regards to preferring ragged-right, but I'm pretty sure that's just a guess. It seems readers do find fully-justified text harder to read on the web sometimes, but I'd be willing to bet that it has a lot more to do with column width, leading and word/letter spacing. (Without appropriate hyphenation, word spacing can vary greatly in justified text, especially when lines are short-ish and words are long-ish.) I've found that a good screen-purposed serif typeface set with extra leading (1.2 em seems to be about right) and a line length of 35-40 ems works very well as justified text for "publications". Decent automated hyphenation ought to make things a lot better.