Talk:Justification (typesetting)

message: This article is full of inaccuracies
1. "kerning" is the adjustment of space between a pair of letters, almost always for aesthetic purpose, and is not an aid in justification. The term you want is "tracking" or "White space addition/subtraction"
2. The use of ligatures is not as an aid in justification -- occasionally, an abbreviation was signaled by a different character which could in some way look like a ligature -- the common ampersand, the less common "paet" (a thorn with a stroke through the upper stem). These are not "ligatures," which again, are usually for aesthetic purposes. The historical English term for these characters was "logotype" - but this was from the days before advertising, so today, that term may add to rather than resolve confusion.
3. That "wedge" mentioned under "French spacing" was (1) not in the printing press, it was in one manufacturer's typesetting machine -- the Linotype linecaster. And (2), it has nothing in particular to do with French spacing -- it was the primary means of justifying copy with the Linotype machine.
And so on.
I'd suggest, and will add to the reference list in time, Ecekersly, Richard, et al. Glossary of Typesetting Terms. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. That's an annotated source, and variance in term usage is often listed. While not the end-all of sources on the subject, anything that conflicts with this book should be carefully checked.
By the way, I'm new to all this. Am I suppose to sign my name to these comments? Be happy to if I should...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Charles ellertson (talk • contribs) 22:25, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Inaccuracies

message: Various sources (?ref) suggest that punctuation at the end of a justified line should hang out past the right-hand alignment line.  My familiarity with this is that several people tried to do this for their dissertations with TeX and failed (as did I).  For most punctuation (full-stop, comma, exclamation point, semicolon, colon, right single- and double-quotation marks) this seems favourable, but the interrogation mark is distracting to the eye because of its greater width.  Comments?
:It's called hanging punctuation and is available only in very sophisticated typesetting systems. Not all punctuation hangs. Quotation marks hang, but periods (full stops) do not. TeX is very difficult to use, because of the arcane way to mark up the text. There are applications that use TeX internally that can make the job easier. Bostoner (talk) 01:30, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: is punctuation at the end of a line justified?

message: "Justification has been the preferred setting of type in many western languages through the history of the written word. 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."
:I can believe this, but have at least one doubt: are we talking about the history of typesetting, or the history of paeleography and writing since 3000 B.C "...through the history of the written word..." ?
:For the time being I am changing "through the history of the written word" to "through the history of moveable type". Hair-splitters beware—moveable type is a reasonable umbrella term for metal and digital systems. Don't be so pedantic. Arbo 16:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: justified text throuout history&mdash;citation, references?

message: In old-fashioned moveable type printing, how is full justification created? Are the space characters made of some sort of compressible material? I have seen fully justified printed texts from as far back as the 1500s. --BrainInAVat 03:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Continuous casting machines like the Linotype used self-adjusting spacebands. I have put that in the artcle text. In the letterpress era (hand-setting), typographers had a vast array of spacing slugs to justify their work :-) No seriously, they did. Arbo 16:09, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  How is it done? 

message: Barely related, but what must I change in my settings to have Wikipedia be justified? I really don’t like text-align:left.David Latapie (✒ | @) 09:31, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You can use user CSS: Help:User style. Quick link: User:David Latapie/monobook.css Also, some webbrowsers, like Konqueror, IE and Firefox, allow you to make modifications to the default stylesheet. Changes here can apply to all webpages, not just to Wikipedia. Shinobu 09:48, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for you answer.David Latapie (✒ | @) — www 23:29, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to change Wikipedia  alignment? 

message: This article is in desparate need for more references, especially on this whole microtypography thing. Shinobu 09:48, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: I think this article needs some comments on when to use justified versus left (or right) aligned text.
In school I was taught to use justified text on short lines (below the magic 80/72 characters), and add extra line-height if longer lines were to be justified. Is this a good guideline?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikoangelo (talk • contribs) 15:44, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You were not taught that in school. The rule is that you pick one and stick to it throughout an entire publication. Erudecorp ? * 23:42, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Usage guidelines 

message: One thing not mentioned in this article: Most software (including HTML, Word, etc.) only justifies text when wordwrapping. I.e. it won't justify broken line of text e.g. a poem. See what I mean: Erudecorp ? * 23:42, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Behavior 

message: Maybe i'm just misunderstanding this, but the statement 
"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."
appears to be saying that justification is not offered in desktop publishing software? That's so wrong as to be laughable. At best, it's 20 years out of date... 
Snazzra (talk) 17:30, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  in desktop publishing 

message: "People with dyslexia (particularly Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome) find that justification interferes..." Not clear if this means full justification, or left justification. In a sense, isn't all text justified somehow, and the question is right, left, full, centered?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.67.129.20 (talk) 16:53, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I added a clarify tag to that paragraph, for what it's worth. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:40, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

text: It appears that justification here means full justification FreeFlow99 (talk) 14:31, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

text: There's no good body of studies that I've seen that can be used to draw real conclusions.  I'd say it's likely that certain visual processing issues related to some forms of dyslexia are likely to be aggravated by BAD justification.  Bad justification can be characterized by narrower columns, lack of sufficient word divisions, and lack of letter spacing adjustments, all of which tend to make rivers more prominent.  These rivers can be a major issue for certain problems. Also, some older studies I've seen that refer to justification looked only at fixed-width fonts, which is generally has horrible results.  Good justification on the other hand is perhaps even likely to have less visual distractions than ragged right.  In my humble opinion.  Of course, none of this is really worth putting into the article but they're issues wiki authors should be aware of when looking at this or that source that's making claims about justification.  I also see some web sources that make completely unsubstantiated claims based entirely on something they heard.  Also, I've seen indications that some text layout choices might be good for one disorder but be bad for a different disorder. Battling McGook (talk) 02:24, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dyslexia and what kind of justification? 

message: I suggest this article should be merged with Typographic alignment. 93.96.236.8 (talk) 08:22, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge?