[Sigia-l] text justification

[Pabini Gabriel-Petit]

Paul Ford wrote:

> A recent weblog post on Clagnut is helpful in clarifying the issues
> related to justification, soft hyphens, and the like:
>
> http://www.clagnut.com/blog/329/

Thanks so much for sharing this very interesting blog. (It's on a beautiful
Web site, too.) There was one line that made me laugh so hard, I had to
share it here:


> CSS3 should offer some relief, when browser vendors implement it
> fully.

Yes. I think there is some disagreement in the publishing community about
whether left-aligned text or well-justified text is better for readability
though. I was a tech writer for many years before becoming a user experience
designer. Technical publications are almost always left aligned, I think
because hyphenation reduces readability. My preference is for left-aligned
text.

> Those who want a geeky explanation of auto-hyphenation, which is
> necessary to justification, should check out The TeXBook
> (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~norbert/texbook.pdf [2.5M]), which has an
> appendix describing Liang's amazing hyphenation algorithm.

Thanks for the link to the PDF, too.

> As pointed out in the comments of the Clagnut post, one possibility
> for those wanting to hyphenate now would be a JavaScript
> implementation of this algorithm. If the browser was identified as one
> that properly managed soft hyphens (IE, Opera, and future versions of
> Safari), the script could apply the Liang algorithm to all words
> inside of text nodes in an HTML page, adding soft hyphens, and the
> browser would be able to handle the rest. It's a fairly zippy
> algorithm, so on most pages it shouldn't slow things down too much
> (very long pages would be a different story). The standard TeX
> hyphenation dictionary is several K, though, and would have to be sent
> over inside a JavaScript array--which would add to download times, and
> given that hyphenation will eventually be part of CSS3, the JavaScript
> approach is probably more trouble than it's worth.
>
> Best,
>
> Paul
>
>
> -- 
> paul ford // words: http://ftrain.com // work: http://copywire.com
>