And just so that we don’t have two days worth of fluff posts…
As part of my new found interest in typography I decided to conduct a quick survey of the use of rag-right versus justified alignment in print today. After wandering around the various newsagents and bookstores in the mall, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
- All newspapers used justified text, rivers be damned.
- Magazines were mixed. All magazines on art and design — web, fashion, architecture — used rag right but for every other genre it was pretty random (Time and Cosmo were justified; New Scientist and Australian Muscle Car weren’t). Interestingly, the less ‘glossy’ a publication was, the more likely it was to use justified text, however the reverse was not true (high production-value magazines could be either).
- Unsurprisingly, all paperbacks (novels and non-fiction, non-picture books) used justified text.
- Books with pictures (coffee table books, art books, travel books, etc.) were mixed. Most used justified body text with rag-right captioning.
- The exception to this (again) were books on design (and, to a lesser extent, art). These almost exclusively used rag right.
I’m starting to get the impression that personal preference for rag right versus justified text might indeed have a relationship with how much institutionalised design training a reader has had. Assuming all publications are typeset by designers (just… assume with me for a moment), this quite possibly would explain why text targeted at designers was almost exclusively rag right; because the target audience is more sensitive to text spacing than the ‘average’ reader. Newer publications also seemed slightly more likely to be rag right (and sans serif), which seems to indicate that it’s at least in part a fashion trend.
Shockingly, I actually managed to find one book on (print) typography too, so I diligently went and read the sections on the justification of text. Nothing much new there; avoid on short lines, use with caution on longer lines, and I even managed to dig up a formulae for how this is traditionally worked out:
Twice the font height in points is the minimum line length in picas for justified text.
So, if you’ve got 12pt font you need a line that is at least 24 picas long before you can start thinking about justifying your words.1 Of course, most people don’t actually know what a pica is (12 points), but here’s a calculator to give a rough pixel approximation (printer’s or computer picas; the differences aren’t huge). However, that being said, remember that this is the rule for print and doesn’t take into account things like, yanno, people being able to resize your text.
Interestingly, the author took a brief segue to talk about his reasoning for using justified text in his book, even though the variable word spacing annoyed him. The decision was an aesthetic one; he thought it looked better to have the square text blocks along-side the much more ‘bitsy’ example text. The other author (the book was, like, two books published together) said a similar thing; justified text gives a strong block look and the reasons for choosing it over rag-right are primarily aesthetic. Rag-right, on the other hand, gives a strong left-hand line and a ‘fuzzy’ right edge.
Unfortunately, typography for the screen/web specifically is apparently a bit too esoteric for the Thunderdome Dymocks, so maybe next weekend a trip out to Borders or the ANU Co-Op might be in order. Hrm…
Also (and this hasn’t occurred to me in the last, like, six years); people out there don’t use ClearType font rendering in Windows XP? Huh. It’s turned off by default, eh? Not so in Vista and not so with OS X; aah, the merry march of progress!
- If you’re wondering; v-s.net uses percentage-based font sizes so I’m not actually sure off the top of my head what the exact resulting points end up as. I think the post body is about 9pt and the comments are about 7pt, which if you’re going by the book’s formula leaves the minimum line lengths as about 290px and 225px respectively. To save you all having to get out your rulers, after guttering and ‘meta’ columns are taken into account, the text box width here is a little over 400px. ^
1033 days ago
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