[Sigia-l] text justification

[Pabini Gabriel-Petit]

Hello All

Let me try this again. My last post inadvertently got sent by a slip of my
fingers before I was finished writing it. My apologies. (Definitely not
trimmed.) I'll put it all together here.

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:

Donald E. Knuth: "[...] computers are notoriously bad at hyphenation. When
the typesetting of newspapers began to be fully automated, jokes about
"the-rapists who pre-ached on wee-knights" soon began to circulate."

> 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, and I always turn off automatic hyphenation.

> 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.

It seems like the best solution would be for all browsers to incorporate a
standard hyphenation algorithm, so no hyphenation-data download or markup
would be required. We should have a flag that we can set to turn automatic
hyphenation on or off on individual Web pages though. Perhaps just the
decision to use justified text would be sufficient.

Pabini
________________________________________

Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Principal & User Experience Architect
Spirit Softworks
www.spiritsoftworks.com