4 ms·

Ok, well I personally find them a bit jarring, after years of mostly reading on the web where they are extremely rare. I remember typing papers on manual typew

Ok, well I personally find them a bit jarring, after years of mostly reading on the web where they are extremely rare. I remember typing papers on manual typewriters and having to think about where to hyphenate (as well as just when to do a carriage return), and it was awful. Admittedly now it is more of an aspect of reading (since an algorithm can do the actual hyphenation), but still. I would prefer we just abandon it. Could explain why it matters more on a printed page that on a monitor? I don't see any relevant differences.

TheRealPomax 8y ago
No, but therein lies the crux. You don't see any relevant differences, but there are billions of people who aren't you, and a good portion of them are what people who don't care about ragged vs perceived aligned edges call "a bit OCD" (even though of course it has nothing to do with OCD). They prefer nice, clean typesetting and layout, and enough of them are disturbed by ragged edges in "not novels" to not even bother reading more than a page. That's eyeballs, and opinions, lost over a typographical feature. So for me, if the choice is between "maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership" (on what are already niche topics; how many people can possible care about Bezier curves, for instance) and "justify the content, with hyphenation because holy shit justified text looks bad without it" and not lose that readership, it's a no-brainer. Because that's primarily what you use it for: you use hyphenation in combination with justified text to make sure that the number of words per line of text end up in the 14~16 range, without crazy longs gaps in sentences that are forced to move words like "reconfiguration" or "interoperability" to the next line because they're not allowed to hyphenate them. Back in the typewriter days, with fixed letter spacing and separate pointsize discs/balls, that was an absolute dire chore: 100% agreed that if at all possible, back then ragged edges were the way to go. But the moment we got decent automated layout management through LaTeX (while plain TeX worked, it was also horrible) and these days XeLateX, and later on HTML+CSS, the "chore" part disappeared. You simply write your text, you turn on auto-hyphenation, and you don't give it a second thought until someone goes "hey this sentence looks really off", and then you fix that one sentence. And then for novels, keep things ragged. The readership's used to it. But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are, not just where you're comfortable.
- robbrown451 8y ago
  "maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership" Uhhh, really? Love to see the A-B test. Or anyone who is so "disturbed" by ragged edges that they'll stop reading and is willing to speak up about it. Sorry, but I think you are making that up. That is an absurd claim. "But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are" Web content has been mostly without hyphenation for 20+ years. People ARE used to it. (If you think I'm a kid with no concept of design: I'm 55 years old, have a degree in design, and was doing bezier and b-spline curves starting in the mid 80s)

TheRealPomax 8y ago

No, but therein lies the crux. You don't see any relevant differences, but there are billions of people who aren't you, and a good portion of them are what people who don't care about ragged vs perceived aligned edges call "a bit OCD" (even though of course it has nothing to do with OCD). They prefer nice, clean typesetting and layout, and enough of them are disturbed by ragged edges in "not novels" to not even bother reading more than a page. That's eyeballs, and opinions, lost over a typographical feature. So for me, if the choice is between "maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership" (on what are already niche topics; how many people can possible care about Bezier curves, for instance) and "justify the content, with hyphenation because holy shit justified text looks bad without it" and not lose that readership, it's a no-brainer. Because that's primarily what you use it for: you use hyphenation in combination with justified text to make sure that the number of words per line of text end up in the 14~16 range, without crazy longs gaps in sentences that are forced to move words like "reconfiguration" or "interoperability" to the next line because they're not allowed to hyphenate them. Back in the typewriter days, with fixed letter spacing and separate pointsize discs/balls, that was an absolute dire chore: 100% agreed that if at all possible, back then ragged edges were the way to go. But the moment we got decent automated layout management through LaTeX (while plain TeX worked, it was also horrible) and these days XeLateX, and later on HTML+CSS, the "chore" part disappeared. You simply write your text, you turn on auto-hyphenation, and you don't give it a second thought until someone goes "hey this sentence looks really off", and then you fix that one sentence. And then for novels, keep things ragged. The readership's used to it. But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are, not just where you're comfortable.

robbrown451 8y ago
"maintain ragged edge, lost half my readership" Uhhh, really? Love to see the A-B test. Or anyone who is so "disturbed" by ragged edges that they'll stop reading and is willing to speak up about it. Sorry, but I think you are making that up. That is an absurd claim. "But for web content, especially the kind of textbooks that can be printed, too, meet the people where they are" Web content has been mostly without hyphenation for 20+ years. People ARE used to it. (If you think I'm a kid with no concept of design: I'm 55 years old, have a degree in design, and was doing bezier and b-spline curves starting in the mid 80s)