Re: [css3-text] ISSUE-229 Combining justification and whitespace:pre*

On 11/04/12 9:25 AM, Brad Kemper wrote:


> Full justification should always be adjusting to space between letters.
>
>

By full justification do you mean normal paragraph justification, or do 
you mean forced justification (in which even the last line is justified, 
although when normally spaced it would be shorter than the other lines)?

I think you'll find that the vast majority of typographers will disagree 
with you, as will, I suspect, cognitive psychologists studying reading. 
Varying the space between words is acceptable within tolerances, but 
letterspacing is not. Typefaces are designed for letters to knit 
together into words according to particular rhythm of internal and 
external white space. Varying letterspacing breaks word units.

The first key to successful full justification is good hyphenation, to 
minimise the variation in word spacing. If hyphenation is done properly 
-- which means analysing more than one line of text -- you never get 
into a situation in which letterspacing even occurs as an option.

JH

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 17:44:50 UTC