Justification (typesetting) - Styles

Styles

The following table displays the difference between a justified (flush left and flush right) and a flush left (and ragged right) text.

Justified (flush left and right)

Flush left, ragged right

Thy father was delighted and cried out to the servant, ‘Give him a hundred and three gold pieces with a robe of honour!’ The man obeyed his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment, when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me; nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and praised by all present. When the blood-letting was over I had no power to keep silence and asked him, ‘By God, O my lord, what made thee say to the servant, Give him an hundred and three dinars?’; and he answered, ‘One dinar was for the astrological observation, another for thy pleasant conversation, the third for the phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred and the dress were for thy verses in my commendation.’” “May God show small mercy to my father,” exclaimed I, “for knowing the like of thee.”

Thy father was delighted and cried out to the servant, ‘Give him a hundred and three gold pieces with a robe of honour!’ The man obeyed his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment, when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me; nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and praised by all present. When the blood-letting was over I had no power to keep silence and asked him, ‘By God, O my lord, what made thee say to the servant, Give him an hundred and three dinars?’; and he answered, ‘One dinar was for the astrological observation, another for thy pleasant conversation, the third for the phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred and the dress were for thy verses in my commendation.’” “May God show small mercy to my father,” exclaimed I, “for knowing the like of thee.”

It was common for early electronic printers to use monospaced fonts, and word processing packages designed for these systems often allowed text to be justified by inserting extra spaces between words in the shorter lines. This has the disadvantage that it tends to lead to very uneven spaces between words.

The following is an example of right-justified text in a monospaced font, one in which each character, including the whitespace character, occupies the same amount of horizontal space:

And indeed thou shalt never find a man better versed in affairs than I, and I am here standing on my feet to serve thee. I am not vexed with thee: why shouldest thou be vexed with me? But whatever happen I will bear patiently with thee in memory of the much kindness thy father shewed me." "By God," cried I, "O thou with tongue long as the tail of a jackass, thou persistest in pestering me with thy prate and thou becomest more longsome in thy long speeches, when all I want of thee is to shave my head and wend thy way!"

Justification sometimes leads to typographic anomalies. When justification is used in narrow columns, exceptionally large spaces appear between only two or three words (creating what is called a loose line). When the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear. Rivers appear in right-aligned, left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to flow in justified text due to extra word spacing. Both of these problems are reduced by the addition of hyphenation. In WYSIWYG word processors, this was at one time done manually, with the writer adding hyphenation on a case-by-case basis, though modern word processors hyphenate automatically, as do typesetting systems such as LaTeX. In the latter case, automatic hyphenation is required, with manual override as needed, because the writer cannot tell during text preparation where a line will end in the typeset output.

People with dyslexia (particularly Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome) find that justification interferes with cognitive understanding. Since spacing after a full stop is only a fraction of the spacing within a sentence (approximately 10%), full stops only marginally contribute to the river effect. Hyphenation can also be an issue.

At one time, common word-processing software adjusted only the spacing between words, which was a source of this problem. Modern word processing packages, and professional publishing software, significantly reduce the rivers effect through adjusting the spacing between characters as well as using more advanced digital typography techniques such as automatically choosing among different glyphs for the same character and slightly stretching or shrinking the character in order to better fill the line. The technique of glyph scaling or microtypography has been implemented by Adobe InDesign and more recent versions of pdfTeX.

Word-processing software usually use a different kind of justification when dealing with Arabic texts. Using kashida, characters or glyphs are elongated instead of stretching the white spaces.