Unjustified
Comments: 26
Justified text has left and right margins that line up. It’s the text block you get if you hit that Justify button in your word processor (but you should rarely, if ever, hit that button!). In professionally typeset books, journals, magazines and newspapers, justified text can be used to create a horizontal rhythm that guides the eye across the page. A justified text block is set not at the click of a button, but through the careful balancing of several vital elements: the choice and size of the typeface, the width of the page, the measure (the length of the text block across the page), the language of the text, and the content of the text itself. That writing is generally more legible when set ‘ragged right’ (when the right-hand margin falls where it may) gives you an idea of just how painstakingly justification needs to be approached.
It also begins to hint at why it almost never works on the web.
Browsers do many things well, but one thing they tend to botch horribly is hyphenation. Knowing where and when to break words within themselves is one of the keys to a well-justified page. As Big Bobby Bringhurst tells us in The Elements of Typographic Style,
In justified text there is always a trade-off between evenness of word spacing and frequency of hyphenation. The best available compromise will depend on the nature of the text as well as on the specifics of the design. Good compositors like to avoid consecutive hyphenated line-ends, but frequent hyphens are better than sloppy spacing, and ragged setting is better yet.
This morning while trying to read Rick Perlstein’s article The End of Democracy on The Village Voice’s website, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated (as I often do on that site) by the cruel and terrible design choices inflicted on innocent readers. Why, if you have something interesting to say, would you sabotage yourself at every turn with sheer typographic dumbness?
A mere slice of the page will serve to illustrate.
A measure of about 12 words per line is considered to be ideal for comfortable reading, yet here lines containing twenty or more words bound across the page like unleashed terriers. Actually that image probably suggests a bit too much verve because the justification chops up the lines with an erratic wordspacing that’s not just ugly but a hindrance to reading. Bounding across the page like palsied terriers might be more like it.
But “bounding” suggests you have some room to move, and the margins of this page provide anything but. The growing sense of claustrophobia as you approach the end of the line is knocked out of you by the meaty slap of the journalist’s hand on the typewriter’s carriage return — ding! — as you jam up against a margin that’s tighter than many of the spaces between words.
Then there’s that sidebar. What a horror that is. Every paragraph in it is tagged align="justify" and the first, for some reason, is also blessed with FONT SIZE="1". Despite the fact that the sidebar is set off from the main text by not just one but three devices — its background colour and two borders — justification forces the words out like a centrifuge so that many of them are closer to the main body text than they are to their own neighbours in the sidebar itself.
What’s going on here is that justification is being used as a metonym for seriousness and authority. It’s a cheap trick, and doubly sad in this case because the article is already plenty serious enough. When we hit the justification button in our word processors, what we really want to activate is that “make it look like a book” function in the generally vain hope that some of the gravitas of a well-set page will instantly be transferred to whatever we’ve written.
It doesn’t often work for pages coming out of laser printers, and it’s always best avoided on-screen. On most pages, and certainly on the web, good writing and consideration for your readers are the only justification you need.
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Posted to General Rants • 2004.10.24 (Sun) • 11:29
Comments
Posted by Kristen 2004.10.24, 20:33
My personal rant: every translated Japanese-to-English text I edit is sent to me justified. Now that might make sense since Japanese text is monospaced, but even when I try to gently teach translators that English text should not be justified, it doesn’t seem to stick…
I have a high dislike of justified text.
Posted by Rick Perlstein 2004.10.25, 01:01
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Rick Perlstein
Posted by Chris Hester 2004.10.25, 06:04
There was a way to code pages so words would be broken at exact places, IIRC. (So “international” might be marked up as “inter” and “national”. The words would appear together unless they were forced apart by the end of a tight line.) But sadly it wasn’t cross-browser. Some browsers made a right mess of it. Maybe there was an article on A List Apart about this?
You can just imagine how a client might ask for justification though. “Make it like a newspaper!”. Your example seems to have followed that model. (But why do the columns appear to lack padding or margins? Why do so many sites cram the text in with no thought about white space? (A nasty example: Slashdot, which is made worse by the terrible use of italics and no font specified. The sooner they redesign the better!))
Posted by Richard 2004.10.25, 06:07
Told you I’d be back. Thank you - I have no prior ed in typography (not sure if that’s even the correct term). Justified text and wide wide columns have always driven me nuts but I wasn’t sure if it was just me being weird. I wondered why someone would use justification given how aweful it ends up. And now I’ll also feel more comfortable making my text columns even narrower - 12 - 15 words say.
I also absolutely, unreservedly hate sites that have small light grey (or whatever color nearly illegible) text for their main content . Unless I absolutely have to have the information, I’m outta there. It seems to be a common style and since I figure anyone who goes to the trouble to put up a site must want the content read, what can they possibly be thinking of? Is there a cabal of designers who hate their clients and are off giggling in a corner about how they conned all these deadheads who never try to read their own sites into paying big bucks for the modish design that will kill or maim their businesses? And blue-on-black and all nasty reader-hating similar designer things come in second on the hate parade.
Looking cool is for graphics, not for text. Text needs to be readable. Using the lighter shades to set off informative text, links and so on, makes sense, but for the main content?
Thanks for the chance to rant and the information
Posted by Edd Dumbill 2004.10.26, 06:11
You are my new favourite person.
Posted by -jul- 2004.10.26, 17:43
No. No, no, no, no, no. It’s not about justifying. It’s all about bad design, or, more likely, lack of taste.
Of course, browsers do a harsh job about justifying, but it’s good enough for everyday use. Of course, no software can detect space rivers good enough for an old-fashioned typpgrapher. I can even tell whether a book is typeset by Word or TeX, but a lot of people can’t. This is not print, but an oversimplified typesetter on the screen. This is a huge trade-off, which professionals don’t like.
Besides, I don’t know what monitor do you use, and what browser width do you have, but this is a relative-sized page, and think a bit about the average reader’s browser width: it’s most likely between 800 and 1024. With 800, words/line is about 11-15, which is good. When I use 1024, it increases to 15-19, which is acceptable. Sidebar’s small text font is good choice for justifying, but a very bad one if somebody actually wants to read it.
What is not acceptable, is margins. There is no margin between the sidebar and body text. This is unforgivable. There’re small margins between the frame and any text. Too narrow! It’s more a design issue.
Posted by Robert Andrews 2004.10.26, 20:06
On the contrary, full justification makes text significantly easier to read. Justification does not depend on hyphenation breaking words at the end of lines - that’s just one aspect of the practice, which relies far more on appropriate spacing between words and letters. Only a minority of words can justifiably (ho-ho) be hyphenated; in most cases, hyphenation doesn’t make sense.
The sooner more publishers start justifying their test, the better.
The problem with Village Voice content pages is not that they’ve used justification. It’s that the text runs too close to the edges; that would be the same with ragged-edge text and is the same with the left-hand edge of the copy, which always appears justified.
The same can be said of the sidebar. The problem there is not justification; it’s bad justification. The text runs too close to the edges and there is a mix of font sizes. Not to mention the fact that sidebars in articles are a print convention and the jury is out on how well they work online. In this example, you can feel the print-publishing methodology being employed.
Posted by Joe Clark 2004.10.28, 00:12
Just so we’ll be clear, Jul and Robert Andrews are both completely wrong.
Posted by Allan Moult 2004.10.31, 17:32
Hear. Hear.
This is my biggest beef with fluid layouts as well.
Posted by Nathan 2004.11.08, 17:50
I think it could have it’s place on the web, but it’s place is not as large as people think it should be. I sometimes use a stylesheet in my RSS reader that is justified, but only sometimes.
I think that like everything else, it can have a place, but that the abundance of wrong usage makes it hard to justify the use of justification.
Now if you think that I am wrong and that it has no place on the web at all, then that is fine. I probably will never use it for a client in my life.
Posted by Watts Martin 2004.11.10, 06:06
I don’t think Jul and Robert Andrews are completely wrong, just wrong for the justification algorithms that browsers use. If a browser had a credible hyphenation dictionary and respected the soft hyphen entity correctly, they’d be less wrong; if a browser had those things and a paragraph-based justification algorithm like TeX’s, they’d be right. And I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic about browsers that prevents them from implementing such an algorithm; it’s simply that nobody’s done it yet.
Posted by David House 2004.11.17, 05:01
You didn’t convince me. Your example was rubbish (far too many factors in play to blame it all on justification), and I’ve found no solid evidence, or indeed no full argument as to why justified text is harder to read than right-ragged text.
Posted by Peter Uchytil 2004.11.18, 04:47
I like the look of justified text sometimes. It does have the potential to go horribly wrong, as in the sidebar sample you show. I use it on my site, but I agree that it’s not all that great. I agree that to really get a pro feel to text, it has to have someone set it at least partially by hand.
Having said that, I wish that there could be a tag for auto-kerning (I think that’s what it’s called) of text. That way the spacing wouldn’t be just applied to the words, but to the letters within the words, and the words at the same time. When using programs like InDesign, I’ve found that varying the kerning goes a long way to making more readable justified text. I would take this over hyphenation.
Posted by Mark Kenny 2004.11.28, 10:22
Well, up until now I have always been a justify fascist. I use it in all my printed media (essays etc) and have used it on websites I’ve created. From the bile that’s being poured on proponents of justifying I will, from now on, scrap it! You’ve got yourself a convert!
Posted by Ian Gordon 2004.12.03, 10:12
I think its just a matter of preference, I mean surely you want to make sure the text isn’t crazy spaced out but, I mean justification looks better in some instances that a ragged-right. I know that I often choose justification in my side columns because, the way the text looks kind of bunched together.
Either way I can see motives for either choice but, again I think it depends on the designer and the look they are trying to pull off, sometimes it goes off VERY badly but, for the most part I think its fine. If there was a way to convert from justified to left or right, that could be helpful in say the instances of the Villiage Voice.
Posted by William 2005.03.05, 19:09
I’d have to agree with Jul about this topic.. sorry!
Posted by John 2005.03.19, 06:20
TeX justifies as well as any human, or better, by the way.
Posted by Sar-Webdesign 2005.05.03, 23:48
I like your site design and your logo design too.
good luck
Posted by Białogóra 2005.08.29, 10:37
I?d have to agree with Jul about this topic.. sorry!
Posted by noclegi nad morzem 2005.08.29, 10:40
I?d have to agree with Jul about this topic.. sorry!
Posted by Christian 2005.10.25, 02:17
The problem with justified text, in light of the fact that it can be made just as (or nearly as) readable as text set rag-right, is that it still results in inconsistent spacing, and what’s more, it makes the text feel cold, rigid, and without any warmth.
This alleged sense of order and neatness that readers perceive in justified text might be modified if they were to see a gently flowing, well-set rag. It almost looks justified, but respects the spacing and kerning of fonts. It also adds a bit of variety and interest to the page. The text looks more organic, more natural. The rag is controlled, or massaged, by judicious hyphenation. This way, no lines jut out conspicuously over others, and the rag looks more attractive.
I’d urge proponents of justified text to read Eric Gill’s “An Essay on Typography”, particularly the chapter describing the “procrustean bed.”
So, unless absolutely necessary, there is no justification for fully justified text.
Posted by Samantha 2006.04.25, 10:00
It seems that people will do what others tell them to do. I have gone along with those who don’t know what they’re doing and think it’s good. I’m glad I read this. Now I have another person to follow…except now I’m doing the “right” thing. Moves me to rethink my logic.
Posted by Jo 2006.05.15, 13:38
I agree with Ian Gordon. It’s all personal preference. In some cases it’s completely overabused and can look horrible, but even when it is, it’s personally not very hard on my eyes. I like the clean look it gives text, because normally when you type, things just naturally fall into place and the spacing isn’t at all bad. You hardly notice it, I think. It’s just my personal preference though, as aforementioned, and it can be very well abused.
Posted by Rick 2006.05.25, 20:51
I agree the sidebar looks ugly, mainly because the rightmost words jam up against the main text, but the text doesn’t appear to be justified. Maybe they changed it because of your post?
Posted by Jenni 2006.06.05, 16:24
‘It?s the text block you get if you hit that Justify button in your word processor (but you should rarely, if ever, hit that button!). ‘
Unless of course you’re doing a university course where it is required for ALL your papers ;)
Posted by E Schum 2006.06.29, 01:22
I’d like to second Christian’s recommendation on reading Eric Gill’s “An Essay on Typgraphy” regarding typography and proper treatment of type. Additionally a great book to buy and read for justification as well as other rules and thoughts on typography and page organization (pages 190-192) is “The Elements of Typographic Style” v.30, Robert Bringhurst (ISBN: 0-88179-206-3). It’s worth every penny of the $30.00 in the USA.
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