4 ms·

The hyphenation on the center-spread column doesn't look great, leaving big whitespace gaps in justified text. In my experience, "hyphens: auto" in browsers do

The hyphenation on the center-spread column doesn't look great, leaving big whitespace gaps in justified text. In my experience, "hyphens: auto" in browsers doesn't work well at widths smaller than 80ch. The "center-spread" column is currently set to width: 600px, approximately 67ch. Changing it to width: 80ch looks much, much better, in my opinion. I also suggest adding the Safari variant, "-webkit-hyphens: auto", and add the lang="en" attribute to your <html> tag, to enable hyphenation in Firefox.

ComputerGuru 6y ago
It’s really sad how much typesetting and font rendering has taken a backseat since the 80s and 90s. It seems like just yesterday the race was about finding the optimal algorithms for typesetting text to avoid rivers, have aesthetically pleasing ragged or justified text, tweak word breaking heuristics to avoid local optima that give poor overall results, etc and coming up with fonts that were hand-hinted and carefully designed to display as correctly as possible on the output devices of the time. Now, we’re lucky if we get an option to manually specify hyphenation points for line wrapping, we have horribly thin and broken “web fonts” that supersede even locally installed versions with correct hinting of the same typeface, have disabled subpixel rendering so we can play nicer with animations, transitions, and useless effects, and consider ourselves incredibly lucky if we get real italics rather than oblique versions of the Roman typeface *for fonts with italic versions around since the early ‘90s.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  That is _only_ an issue on the web. Any half decent typesetting program should have no issues at all doing it right. And even then it is getting better, the modern CSS can do things Word can't (notably all small caps and old style figures).
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    > That is only an issue on the web After championing it and spending 13 years adding it to the OS and getting it supported everywhere, Microsoft removed ClearType subpixel rendering from Windows 8’s UI framework for those same reasons, went on to ship Windows 10 without it, and only went back on that decision with the Creator’s Update and are still working to correct that mistake and its fallout.
jfk13 6y ago
My understanding is that "hyphens:auto" should not be doing anything in the absence of a lang attribute: the browser is not supposed to do automatic hyphenation if the content language is unknown. https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#hyphenation https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#hyphenation
- jfk13 6y ago
  I was going to file a bug against Chrome, but it turns out this was reported several years ago already: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=676270 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=676270

ComputerGuru 6y ago

It’s really sad how much typesetting and font rendering has taken a backseat since the 80s and 90s. It seems like just yesterday the race was about finding the optimal algorithms for typesetting text to avoid rivers, have aesthetically pleasing ragged or justified text, tweak word breaking heuristics to avoid local optima that give poor overall results, etc and coming up with fonts that were hand-hinted and carefully designed to display as correctly as possible on the output devices of the time. Now, we’re lucky if we get an option to manually specify hyphenation points for line wrapping, we have horribly thin and broken “web fonts” that supersede even locally installed versions with correct hinting of the same typeface, have disabled subpixel rendering so we can play nicer with animations, transitions, and useless effects, and consider ourselves incredibly lucky if we get real italics rather than oblique versions of the Roman typeface *for fonts with italic versions around since the early ‘90s.

tomjen3 6y ago
That is _only_ an issue on the web. Any half decent typesetting program should have no issues at all doing it right. And even then it is getting better, the modern CSS can do things Word can't (notably all small caps and old style figures).
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  > That is only an issue on the web After championing it and spending 13 years adding it to the OS and getting it supported everywhere, Microsoft removed ClearType subpixel rendering from Windows 8’s UI framework for those same reasons, went on to ship Windows 10 without it, and only went back on that decision with the Creator’s Update and are still working to correct that mistake and its fallout.

jfk13 6y ago

My understanding is that "hyphens:auto" should not be doing anything in the absence of a lang attribute: the browser is not supposed to do automatic hyphenation if the content language is unknown. https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#hyphenation https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#hyphenation

jfk13 6y ago
I was going to file a bug against Chrome, but it turns out this was reported several years ago already: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=676270 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=676270