Good list, though here comes my Hacker News-style pesky comment:
Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt.
Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost.
Justified text is beautiful ... in narrow-ish columns with good hyphenation. But hyphenation sucks on the web, and without hyphenation you can't even do narrow columns even in the rare cases where it would make sense for the reader.
Browsers take hyphenation hints: insert ­ in a word to tell it that it can put a hyphen there. Either combined with css ´hyphens: auto´ to tell the browser to also choose where to put hyphens, or ´hyphens: manual´ so your hints are the only thing that counts. Then just do it all server-side. Browsers still aren't the best at actually using that, but it's better than not hyphenating at all. (and of course you could write your own layout engine that uses your soft hints)
But shipping a whole dictionary wouldn't even be that unreasonable. A reasonable English dictionary is about 1.5MB compressed or 4MB uncompressed.
This is absolutely it for me. It's also why I like paragraphs to have some level of spacing between them.
I'm currently reading a book that has quite minimal indentation on the first line of a paragraph, no spacing between, small font, and justified text. Every page is just a wall of text. It makes it noticeably more tiring to read than others that I've read recently. It seems to be a trend in more serious historical tomes. The last one I read, the Beauty and the Terror, was similarly typeset.
It's one of the reasons I like reading on my kindle.
And lowercase letters are easier to read than ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS IN A HORIZONTAL LINE OF TEXT.
Justified text is the same thing, but vertically. Your eye reaches the end of the line, and the next one is likely slightly longer or shorter, so it is easier for your eyes to find the next line instead of reading the same line over again, and also easier to see the whole shape of a particular paragraph you want to refer to later.
I do like well-hyphenated justified paragraphs in print, that also let you fit more words per page. But even there, I prefer the organic, non-uniform look of ragged text.
Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on:
- layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!)
- the lines are often too long
- the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design
These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing.
I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web.
> I would like to take this opportunity to complain that LaTeX iS cApItAlIzEd lIkE tHiS.
In case you were complaining because you don't know why, rather than because you knew why but don't like it, it's LaTeX because it's Lamport + TeX; and it's actually not really TeX but TEΧ (that last letter is a chi), which, when typeset properly (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Te...), was meant specifically to show off TEΧ's layout abilities.
Sometimes referred to as smilies, though IMO that word describes the 3ish character subset that look like a face at 90 degrees⁰, and predating emoji¹ by quite some time².
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[0] Like :-)
[0] and many many others: ;-) :-( :-| :-p 8-) …
[1] the graphical alternatives
[2] first commonly used in the early 80s, even before my time online, where emoji turned up right at the end of the 90s
> Way back when, we used to call ASCII like ":)" smilies, didn't we? I'm so old I don't even remember clearly. x_x
I always thought that ~it's only called Champagne if it's from the Champagne region of France~ it's only called a smiley if it's smiling. But, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon (and as confirmed by http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm), their progenitor Scott Fahlman gave :-( as a prototypical example, so what do I know?
And Windows actually has a library of them for easy insertion. It's part of the same interface as selecting emoji. Just hit Win+. (Win+{Period}) and switch to the ";-)" tab.
Justified text on a screen is a feature that makes my eyes and brain hurt.
Ragged text is much easier to read. Uneven and beautiful, like a plant whose details you rest your eyes upon as you observe, rather than a uniform concrete structure where vision is lost.
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