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Why are people so bothered by justification when reading on a screen, while it's clearly preferred when it comes to books? Is it just because the automated jus
by bobcostas55 7y ago
Why are people so bothered by justification when reading on a screen, while it's clearly preferred when it comes to books?
Is it just because the automated justification algorithms are so terrible?
- aasasd 7y agoAfaik specifically browsers' hyphenation algorithms aren't made for optimal output. Software like InDesign or TeX spends some time juggling the text to find the best layout for an entire page or several of them, taking a bunch of factors into account. Meanwhile, a browser has to slap a paragraph together in a few milliseconds.
- gwern 7y agoI don't think speed is the main problem. People have reimplemented the TeX algorithm in JS and it's fine. After all, Knuth was doing pages per second back in the 1970s, and it's 2019. But the problem there is that it breaks some sort of CSS property and so the browsers adamantly refuse to use it and the devs say that not much can be done to improve things.
- aasasd 7y agoAh, yes, I've heard about this: proper justification with even spacing is incompatible with the CSS spec, as iirc the spec pretty much says a paragraph must take minimum vertical space. Alas exact details elude me, as well as why a spec change wouldn't fix this.
- gwern 7y agoYes, something like that. Greedy layout is required. As for a spec change - changing the standard? And who knows what it would break at this point? Might as well wish for a pony.
- aasasd 7y agoEh, from the level of discussion on such issues it seems that every detail of rendering is figured out even outside browser teams. And since afaik it's browser implementors who are defining the spec nowadays, I have some hope that they'll see the light.
- beaconstudios 7y agoWhy not introduce a new layout rule? `text-align: tex-justify `