Justified versus ragged right? (take II)

Subject: Justified versus ragged right? (take II)
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: TECHWR-L List <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Sean Brierley <sbrierley -at- Accu-Time -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:49:09 -0400

I stated that ragged-right text takes more space than full
justification. Sean Brierley noted: <<I just tested this by making
all my body text fully justified--don't want to do that with lists as
the inter-word spacing could be huge. For a FrameMaker file, a
chapter in my book, I saw no change in page count.>>

Did you take the time to adjust the hyphenation settings? Did you
manually correct any line breaks? That makes a huge difference. If
you try the same test in InDesign (which has a superb typesetting
engine), you'll see the results instantly: switching to full
justification visibly pulls more text onto the page. I see this all
the time when I pass text from Word (largely ragged right) to
InDesign: soon as I apply a fully justified paragraph style, text
reflows onto the current page. There might be no difference if I
manually hyphenated all ragged-right lines or set this to happen
automatically using a good hyphenation dictionary. Haven't tested
that, but it seems reasonable.

However, as you note: <<The reality in this case is that numbered
lists, the occasional note, the many graphics, and other factors
absorb any significant efficiency of justified text.>>

That's certainly true for many types of document. I was thinking of
journal articles, novels, newspapers, and textbooks when I wrote my
original response, and I didn't state that as my starting assumption.
My bad.

<<Also, with regard to readability, don't you find that varying the
space between words, even over a 5-inch text column, leads to the
space between sentences becoming hidden ... and the full stop being
less noticeable ... so perhaps (the dreaded) two spaces between
sentences becomes appropriate?>>

Again, this depends entirely on the software you're using and whether
you take time to tweak the hyphenation and justification settings.
With InDesign, for instance, I find that apart from my obsessive
desire to tweak the line breaks <g>, the spacing becomes sufficiently
consistent that I don't even notice the spacing variations. With
Word, the spacing variations are grossly obvious unless I tweak the
paragraph settings carefully -- which is generally more work than I'm
prepared to do. (I just pass the text to InDesign and let the
software make it nice for me.)

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RE: Justified versus ragged right? (take II): From: Sean Brierley

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