4 ms·

Experience: One of my primary clients when I ran an agency for 7 years was a book publishers. You'd fall over if you saw the subtlety of the tools and the amou

Experience: One of my primary clients when I ran an agency for 7 years was a book publishers. You'd fall over if you saw the subtlety of the tools and the amount of effort that goes in to typesetting a book with justified body text. It is not at all unusual for a publisher to employ staff specifically for the task of typesetting. In the final stages of book production, the typesetters are assigned sections of the book after all edits are complete (ha! in a perfect world), at which point they meticulously review each page of text, often manually inserting/removing hyphenation, until the text is laid out correctly. Care to venture a guess at the number of bloggers who do the same when using 'text-align: justify'?

Already__Taken 12y ago
I assume justifying text is to primarily maximise the amount of text on the paper to make a cheaper book. It shouldn't even exist on the web.
- wtbob 12y ago
  Justification doesn't change the amount of text on the paper; it spreads out lines which would otherwise have a ragged right edge (in left-to-right languages) so that the text has a visually appealing right edge. It's done to look good, and succeeds. But it requires work to do right.
  - joshuapants 12y ago
    > Justification doesn't change the amount of text on the paper You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. > It's done to look good, and succeeds. But it requires work to do right. Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good, and in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time.
    - falsedan 12y ago
      > You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. no you can't
      - joshuapants 12y ago
        Kerned properly, you absolutely can. Please don't make authoritative statements if you've only ever justified text by highlighting a paragraph and having the computer do it automatically. editing to be a bit more descriptive: Here's an example: http://i.stack.imgur.com/ahM5C.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/ahM5C.png With hyphenation and acceptable kerning, the justified text has more characters per line.
        falsedan 12y ago
        justification refers only to adjusting intra-word and -letter spacings, your example shows hyphenation only
        joshuapants 12y ago
        My example shows, respectively, justification with hyphenation, justification without hyphenation, and left aligned type. You can keep backpedaling, but I have demonstrated that you can have more characters per line with justified text.
    - wtbob 12y ago
      > You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. Ummm, justification is about adding space to spread a line out: it's impossible to fit more text on a line that way. Kerning is about removing space. It's related to by independent of justification. A well-laid-out work will do both. > Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good Meh. For printed material I think it's worth the effort to justify. > in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time. No argument there.
cauterized 12y ago
It's not just about hyphenation. Typesetting a book includes eliminating "widows" and "orphans" (lines isolated from their paragraphs by page breaks, and final lines of paragraphs with only one or two words) as well as "rivers" of whitespace that can occur when spaces between words inadvertently line up vertically, and the stretching / compression when a line has more or fewer words than average. This is done by adjusting where line breaks fall. Basically, in a well-typeset book, nearly every line break is a manually selected hard break rather than an automatically generated soft wrap.

Already__Taken 12y ago

I assume justifying text is to primarily maximise the amount of text on the paper to make a cheaper book. It shouldn't even exist on the web.

wtbob 12y ago
Justification doesn't change the amount of text on the paper; it spreads out lines which would otherwise have a ragged right edge (in left-to-right languages) so that the text has a visually appealing right edge. It's done to look good, and succeeds. But it requires work to do right.
- joshuapants 12y ago
  > Justification doesn't change the amount of text on the paper You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. > It's done to look good, and succeeds. But it requires work to do right. Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good, and in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time.
  - falsedan 12y ago
    > You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. no you can't
    - joshuapants 12y ago
      Kerned properly, you absolutely can. Please don't make authoritative statements if you've only ever justified text by highlighting a paragraph and having the computer do it automatically. editing to be a bit more descriptive: Here's an example: http://i.stack.imgur.com/ahM5C.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/ahM5C.png With hyphenation and acceptable kerning, the justified text has more characters per line.
      - falsedan 12y ago
        justification refers only to adjusting intra-word and -letter spacings, your example shows hyphenation only
        joshuapants 12y ago
        My example shows, respectively, justification with hyphenation, justification without hyphenation, and left aligned type. You can keep backpedaling, but I have demonstrated that you can have more characters per line with justified text.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    > You can fit more characters per line in a justified layout. Ummm, justification is about adding space to spread a line out: it's impossible to fit more text on a line that way. Kerning is about removing space. It's related to by independent of justification. A well-laid-out work will do both. > Absolutely, but well executed left-alignment can also look good Meh. For printed material I think it's worth the effort to justify. > in a format where you don't necessarily have control over the size of the page and the time to properly justify the text it should be preferred. IMO, left-alignment beats poorly justified text every time. No argument there.

cauterized 12y ago

It's not just about hyphenation. Typesetting a book includes eliminating "widows" and "orphans" (lines isolated from their paragraphs by page breaks, and final lines of paragraphs with only one or two words) as well as "rivers" of whitespace that can occur when spaces between words inadvertently line up vertically, and the stretching / compression when a line has more or fewer words than average. This is done by adjusting where line breaks fall. Basically, in a well-typeset book, nearly every line break is a manually selected hard break rather than an automatically generated soft wrap.