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Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is muc

Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment: Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt. Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

netcraft 2y ago
I totally agree. I think its because it lets my eyes get their bearings, like sensing the terrain.
- noneeeed 2y ago
  This is absolutely it for me. It's also why I like paragraphs to have some level of spacing between them. I'm currently reading a book that has quite minimal indentation on the first line of a paragraph, no spacing between, small font, and justified text. Every page is just a wall of text. It makes it noticeably more tiring to read than others that I've read recently. It seems to be a trend in more serious historical tomes. The last one I read, the Beauty and the Terror, was similarly typeset. It's one of the reasons I like reading on my kindle.
- hypertexthero 2y ago
  Yes! And lowercase letters are easier to read than ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS IN A HORIZONTAL LINE OF TEXT. Justified text is the same thing, but vertically. Your eye reaches the end of the line, and the next one is likely slightly longer or shorter, so it is easier for your eyes to find the next line instead of reading the same line over again, and also easier to see the whole shape of a particular paragraph you want to refer to later. I do like well-hyphenated justified paragraphs in print, that also let you fit more words per page. But even there, I prefer the organic, non-uniform look of ragged text.
mbforbes 2y ago
Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on: - layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!) - the lines are often too long - the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing. I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web. (edit: formatting) [1] https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/ https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > I would like to take this opportunity to complain that LaTeX iS cApItAlIzEd lIkE tHiS. In case you were complaining because you don't know why, rather than because you knew why but don't like it, it's LaTeX because it's Lamport + TeX; and it's actually not really TeX but TEΧ (that last letter is a chi), which, when typeset properly (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/TeX_logo.svg/200px-TeX_logo.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Te...), was meant specifically to show off TEΧ's layout abilities. (In fact Lamport got into the spirit of it, and the real name is LATEΧ, again carefully typeset: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/LaTeX_project_logo_bird.svg/480px-LaTeX_project_logo_bird.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/La... . The common stylization LaTeX is just a convenient ASCII representation.)
baxtr 2y ago
Meta comment: that’s the third comment I see this week with “quasi” emojis. Is this becoming a trend? o_o
- bhaney 2y ago
  > (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ > o_o > “quasi” emojis Welp, if you need me I'll be shuffling my weary bones into a casket.
  - gary_0 2y ago
    Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x I always thought that ~it's only called Champagne if it's from the Champagne region of France~ it's only called a smiley if it's smiling. But, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon (and as confirmed by http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm), their progenitor Scott Fahlman gave :-( as a prototypical example, so what do I know?
  - juliushuijnk 2y ago
    What is this part supposed to represent? ︵ ┻━┻
    - bhaney 2y ago
      That's a table being flipped. The whole thing is the table-flip eastern-style emoticon (kaomoji).
      - juliushuijnk 2y ago
wongarsu 2y ago
Justified text is beautiful ... in narrow-ish columns with good hyphenation. But hyphenation sucks on the web, and without hyphenation you can't even do narrow columns even in the rare cases where it would make sense for the reader.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Well, you can in theory send an entire dictionary with your page to make it not suck. I don't plan to ever do something like this for any purpose, and I have never seen anybody do it either... But you can.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    Browsers take hyphenation hints: insert  in a word to tell it that it can put a hyphen there. Either combined with css ´hyphens: auto´ to tell the browser to also choose where to put hyphens, or ´hyphens: manual´ so your hints are the only thing that counts. Then just do it all server-side. Browsers still aren't the best at actually using that, but it's better than not hyphenating at all. (and of course you could write your own layout engine that uses your soft hints) But shipping a whole dictionary wouldn't even be that unreasonable. A reasonable English dictionary is about 1.5MB compressed or 4MB uncompressed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

netcraft 2y ago

I totally agree. I think its because it lets my eyes get their bearings, like sensing the terrain.

noneeeed 2y ago
This is absolutely it for me. It's also why I like paragraphs to have some level of spacing between them. I'm currently reading a book that has quite minimal indentation on the first line of a paragraph, no spacing between, small font, and justified text. Every page is just a wall of text. It makes it noticeably more tiring to read than others that I've read recently. It seems to be a trend in more serious historical tomes. The last one I read, the Beauty and the Terror, was similarly typeset. It's one of the reasons I like reading on my kindle.
hypertexthero 2y ago
Yes! And lowercase letters are easier to read than ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS IN A HORIZONTAL LINE OF TEXT. Justified text is the same thing, but vertically. Your eye reaches the end of the line, and the next one is likely slightly longer or shorter, so it is easier for your eyes to find the next line instead of reading the same line over again, and also easier to see the whole shape of a particular paragraph you want to refer to later. I do like well-hyphenated justified paragraphs in print, that also let you fit more words per page. But even there, I prefer the organic, non-uniform look of ragged text.

mbforbes 2y ago

Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on: - layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!) - the lines are often too long - the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing. I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web. (edit: formatting) [1] https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/ https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/

JadeNB 2y ago
> I would like to take this opportunity to complain that LaTeX iS cApItAlIzEd lIkE tHiS. In case you were complaining because you don't know why, rather than because you knew why but don't like it, it's LaTeX because it's Lamport + TeX; and it's actually not really TeX but TEΧ (that last letter is a chi), which, when typeset properly (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/TeX_logo.svg/200px-TeX_logo.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Te...), was meant specifically to show off TEΧ's layout abilities. (In fact Lamport got into the spirit of it, and the real name is LATEΧ, again carefully typeset: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/LaTeX_project_logo_bird.svg/480px-LaTeX_project_logo_bird.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/La... . The common stylization LaTeX is just a convenient ASCII representation.)

baxtr 2y ago

Meta comment: that’s the third comment I see this week with “quasi” emojis. Is this becoming a trend? o_o

bhaney 2y ago
> (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ > o_o > “quasi” emojis Welp, if you need me I'll be shuffling my weary bones into a casket.
- gary_0 2y ago
  Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x I always thought that ~it's only called Champagne if it's from the Champagne region of France~ it's only called a smiley if it's smiling. But, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon (and as confirmed by http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm), their progenitor Scott Fahlman gave :-( as a prototypical example, so what do I know?
- juliushuijnk 2y ago
  What is this part supposed to represent? ︵ ┻━┻
  - bhaney 2y ago
    That's a table being flipped. The whole thing is the table-flip eastern-style emoticon (kaomoji).
    - juliushuijnk 2y ago

wongarsu 2y ago

Justified text is beautiful ... in narrow-ish columns with good hyphenation. But hyphenation sucks on the web, and without hyphenation you can't even do narrow columns even in the rare cases where it would make sense for the reader.

marcosdumay 2y ago
Well, you can in theory send an entire dictionary with your page to make it not suck. I don't plan to ever do something like this for any purpose, and I have never seen anybody do it either... But you can.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Browsers take hyphenation hints: insert  in a word to tell it that it can put a hyphen there. Either combined with css ´hyphens: auto´ to tell the browser to also choose where to put hyphens, or ´hyphens: manual´ so your hints are the only thing that counts. Then just do it all server-side. Browsers still aren't the best at actually using that, but it's better than not hyphenating at all. (and of course you could write your own layout engine that uses your soft hints) But shipping a whole dictionary wouldn't even be that unreasonable. A reasonable English dictionary is about 1.5MB compressed or 4MB uncompressed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]