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

On Apr 11, 2012, at 10:44 AM, John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com> wrote:

> 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

I meant that doing letter spacing is part of the formula for justification. Perhaps I overstated that idea. 

In InDesign, you can change the formula, by changing the minimum, desired, and maximum spacing for both letters and words and scaling of glyphs. This is handy when you have narrow columns, and you'd rather have a little bit of hardly noticeable space added or removed between letters (and/or a very slight horizontal scaling of glyphs) than to have huge gaps between words. InDesign will also, by default, space out a single word when a second one doesn't fit, even though the letter spacing defaults are all at zero.

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 23:50:14 UTC