Wanted: Dead or alive: whoever invented ragged-right...

[Pasoleati]

Any idea who is the braindead fellow responsible for the very recent phenomenon of laying out books and magazines with ragged-right text? E.g. Aeroplane Monthly is no longer readable thanks to this. Many current rags seem to be designed by people who obviously don't read their own products and/or are high on something round the clock.

 

[Hobbes]

Wow. There still are people who prefer justified text? Justified text looks nice from a distance, but when you start reading, the varying amounts of whitespace between words and even inside words get very distracting to me, especially when the text column is narrow. You need a full page width to make justified text work. Magazines with their narrow text columns, and especially airplane magazines full of long jargon words, are no place for justified text.

 

[Pasoleati]

Fully justified is the only option for me. I boycott publications using crapped right. Any time I attempt to read ragged text I get totally distracted when the eyes wander around and can't get a fix that fully-justified columns provide. Varying amount of whitespace is not a problem, plus it can be minimized by the magic of hyphenation. But apparently younger (I am 39) people are unable to read hyphenated text, at least it seems so as the aversion to hyphenating is so strong in current British rags.

In general, with books and magazines I first check whether they have ragged text, if they do, I don't buy them. I don't read them for free. The pain the ragged design causes is simply too great. In short, ragged=casus belli.

 

[Hobbes]

Hyphenation is a PITA as you need to provide a good dictionary (including all of your specific jargon) or the software will just hyphenate anywhere. Good hyphenation often requires proofreading, so it's one of those things magazines discard to save money.

 

[Pasoleati]

PITA means...?

 

[Hobbes]

pain in the ass

 

[Pasoleati]

Well, I have no problem reading English regardless where it is hyphenated*. With Finnish it is a bit different as the rules of hyphenation are very clear in Finnish.

E.g.

Eng-
lish (this would be the correct by Finnish hyphenation rules)

or

2. En-
glish

or

Engl-
ish

all are kosher to me as far as readability goes.

Plus: I just browsed through a 1989 issue of Aeroplane Monthly. Everything, including captions is fully-justified and simply brilliant!

 

[Orionblamblam]

¡ǝןnɹ ʎɥɔɹɐuɐ ןɐnʇxǝʇ ǝʇǝןdɯoɔ ʇǝן ˙˙˙sɹǝʞɔns ɹoɟ sı ʇxǝʇ "buıʎɟıʇsnظ" ¡¡buoɹʍ ןןɐ ǝɹ,noʎ ¡ɥɐq

 

[Pasoleati]

 

[phil gollin]

.


In English, hyphens should only be inserted at the end of a syllable.


.

 

[Pasoleati]

Yep, but is it "Gol-lin" or "Goll-in"...

 

[Justo Miranda]

No entiendo nada!

 

[Orionblamblam]

Yep, but is it "Gol-lin" or "Goll-in"...

It's "Goll-um."