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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 07/07/07 12:47
Scripsit dorayme:
>> You mean justified text?
>>
>> div {text-align: justify;}
>
> Come to think of it, it used to look terrible when I tried it
It mostly looks terrible or very terrible. My old dusty page on
justification,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/justify.html
is probably _a little_ too pessimistic, since many browser bugs have been
fixed. However, the basic problems still remain:
1) The results depend on the line length (column width), font size, and
other factors. If authors try to "fix" this by setting those parameters to
fixed values, they create further problems.
2) Browsers (normally) achieve the justification by increasing word spacing,
whereas in book typography, character spacing within words may get adjusted,
too. This may result in awfully large gaps between words.
3) Browsers normally don't split a word across lines, and they have no
automatic word division (as typesetting software and even word processors
have). Helping them with ­ is almost safe these days but very clumsy and
does not help on Firefox. This creates serious problems especially when the
document contains long words (which are common in many languages).
> but I just was reminded to have a go again just now and with Safari,
> it looks pretty good. Perhaps it is my beautiful writing style
> with simple short English words or something?
>
> http://tinyurl.com/25vztl
It's not that bad on IE or Firefox either. But it's largely because the line
length is relatively large, as compared with the use of mostly short words.
Yet, if you look e.g. at the start of the 3rd paragraph ("He asked the camel
hire..."), you'll notice that word spacing is disturbingly larger than on
the page as a whole. This would not happen in good book typography.
Besides, if you wish to imitate print typography by using justification, the
effect is odd when you let browsers use "engineering paragraphs" (with empty
lines between paragraphs) instead of "literary paragraphs" (first-line
indents, with no vertical spacing between paragraphs) and you have "computer
quotes" (Ascii quotation marks) instead of proper quotation marks. And Arial
is really a simplistic modern font rather than a typographically stylistic
font.
What I mean is that you have a mix of "engineering style" and "literary
style". Many people are used to seeing and reading both of them, but not as
mixtures.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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