Justification (typesetting)
Encyclopedia
In typesetting
, justification (can also be referred to as 'full justification') is the typographic alignment
setting of text
or image
s within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin
. Text set this way is said to be "justified".
In justified text, the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyph
s or letter
s (kerning
), are stretched or sometimes compressed in order to make the text align with both the left and right margins. When using justification, it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph
separately by left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.
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:
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 (like 1 to 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.
), ligatures, and swash
to help maintain the rhythm and colour of a justified line.
The use of movable type
solidified this preference from a technological point of view. It was much easier to handle and make emendations to large amounts of type that had words or syllables at the ends of lines than it was to respace the ends of lines.
Its use has only waned somewhat since the middle of the 20th century through the advocacy of the typographer Jan Tschichold
's book Asymmetric Typography and the freer typographic treatment of the Bauhaus
, Dada
, and Russian constructivist
movements.
Not all "flush left" settings in traditional typography were identical. In flush left text, words are separated on a line by the minimum word spacing built into the font.
Continuous casting typesetting
systems such as the Linotype
were able to reduce the jaggedness of the right-hand sides of adjacent lines of flush left composition by inserting self-adjusting space bands between words to evenly distribute white space, taking excessive space that would have occurred at the end of the line and redistributing it between words.
This feature, known as "ragged right" or "in and out ragged", was available in traditional dedicated typesetting systems but is absent from most if not all desktop publishing
systems. Graphic designers and typesetters using desktop systems adjust word and letter spacing, or "tracking", on a manual line-by-line basis to achieve the same effect.
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
, justification (can also be referred to as 'full justification') is the typographic alignment
Typographic alignment
In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range, is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column , table cell or tab...
setting of text
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
or image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
s within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin
Margin (typography)
In typography, a margin is the space that surrounds the content of a page. The margin helps to define where a line of text begins and ends. When a page is justified the text is spread out to be flush with the left and right margins...
. Text set this way is said to be "justified".
In justified text, the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s or letter
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
s (kerning
Kerning
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a...
), are stretched or sometimes compressed in order to make the text align with both the left and right margins. When using justification, it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph
Paragraph
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented...
separately by left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.
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
River (typography)
In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. They can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced...
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
WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...
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
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
. 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
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...
(particularly Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome
Scotopic sensitivity syndrome
Scotopic sensitivity syndrome, also known as Irlen Syndrome and Visual Stress Syndrome, approximating in some ways to Meares Irlen syndrome, and 'Visual Stress', refers to visual perceptual disorder affecting primarily reading and writing based activities...
) find that justification interferes with cognitive understanding. Since spacing after a full stop
Full stop
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...
is only a fraction of the spacing within a sentence (like 1 to 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
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books. In conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite InDesign can publish content suitable for tablet devices...
and more recent versions of pdfTeX
PdfTeX
The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno...
.
Word-processing software usually use a different kind of justification when dealing with Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
texts. Using kashida
Kashida
Kashida is a type of justification used in some cursive scripts, particularly Arabic. In contrast to white-space justification, which increases the length of a line of text by expanding spaces between words or individual letters, kashida justification is accomplished by elongating characters at...
, characters or glyphs are elongated instead of stretching the white spaces.
History
Justification has been the preferred setting of type in many western languages through the history of movable type. This is due to the classic Western manuscript book page being built of a column or two columns, which is considered to look "best" if it is even-margined on the left and right. The classical Western column did not rigorously justify, but came as close as feasible when the skill of the penman and the character of the manuscript permitted. Historically, both scribal and typesetting traditions took advantage of abbreviations (siglaSigla
Sigła is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Aleksandrów, within Biłgoraj County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It lies approximately east of Aleksandrów, south-east of Biłgoraj, and south of the regional capital Lublin....
), ligatures, and swash
Swash (typography)
A swash is a typographical flourish on a glyph, like an exaggerated serif.Capital swash characters, which extended to the left, were historically often used to begin sentences. There were also minuscule swash characters, which came either extending to the left, to begin words, or to the right to...
to help maintain the rhythm and colour of a justified line.
The use of movable type
Movable type
Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
solidified this preference from a technological point of view. It was much easier to handle and make emendations to large amounts of type that had words or syllables at the ends of lines than it was to respace the ends of lines.
Its use has only waned somewhat since the middle of the 20th century through the advocacy of the typographer Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.-Life:Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy...
's book Asymmetric Typography and the freer typographic treatment of the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
, Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, and Russian constructivist
Constructivism (art)
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
movements.
Not all "flush left" settings in traditional typography were identical. In flush left text, words are separated on a line by the minimum word spacing built into the font.
Continuous casting typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
systems such as the Linotype
Linotype machine
The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....
were able to reduce the jaggedness of the right-hand sides of adjacent lines of flush left composition by inserting self-adjusting space bands between words to evenly distribute white space, taking excessive space that would have occurred at the end of the line and redistributing it between words.
This feature, known as "ragged right" or "in and out ragged", was available in traditional dedicated typesetting systems but is absent from most if not all desktop publishing
Desktop publishing
Desktop publishing is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal computer.The term has been used for publishing at all levels, from small-circulation documents such as local newsletters to books, magazines and newspapers...
systems. Graphic designers and typesetters using desktop systems adjust word and letter spacing, or "tracking", on a manual line-by-line basis to achieve the same effect.