Fully Justified or Ragged Edge?

[JoolsB]

I'm converting some books for my new Kindle. I can't decide whether I should turn full justification on or off.

Fully justified text looks neater than ragged edge.

Is there any research on which is easier to read, which tires our brains and eyes less?

Do some eReaders do a better job of justification than others?

What do you guys prefer?

[HarryT]

See this thread.

The consensus appears to be that full justification is preferred.

[J. Strnad]

Originally Posted by HarryT

See this thread.

The consensus appears to be that full justification is preferred.

I wouldn't say that (approximately) 41% for left-justified vs. 47% for full justified is a consensus. Seems more like a nearly-equal split, to me.

[HarryT]

Let me rephrase it. A greater number of people expressed a preference for full justification than for left justification.

[GeoffC]

JoolsB



Welcome to mobileread ....

Ragged Right ....

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by JoolsB

Fully justified text looks neater than ragged edge.

At first glance, yes, until you find a line where the words are drawn miles apart so that the text appears neater

One day, maybe, readers will be able to automatically split and hyphenate so that justified text is not so annoying. For the moment, I prefer the ragged edge solution. But I'm not you. Nobody is but you, actually.

Just convert one book at a time and see what you like best after reading a few. If you convert all your books with justified text and later find out you'd rather have the ragged edge, you'll have to do the work again, or be satisfied with books that are no longer optimally formatted for your taste. So, convert and read one first, then convert the next and read that one...

[lord_blackfang]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

At first glance, yes, until you find a line where the words are drawn miles apart so that the text appears neater

This doesn't really happen all that often unless you use a ridiculously large font, does it?

[HarryT]

The best option is not to hard-code justification at all, and allow the user to select whichever form of justification they prefer.

[simonroyle]

Hey Jools welcome to a great site for authors - because this is a place where modern readers hang out.

Being in the same position I asked that same question a little while back. Read through the thread it covers more than you want to know.

In a nutshell for Smashwords leave it as is left justify (there isn't a way to not have it justified - savvy ereaders will take care of how they want to read it). For Kindle go with fully justified, and watch out for the BIG spaces.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by lord_blackfang

This doesn't really happen all that often unless you use a ridiculously large font, does it?

On 5" screens, it happens often enough to get annoying after a while. Especially if the book uses a lot of dashes or other typographic signs that may be interpreted as part of a word, instead as a separation between words. I think that the problem with dashes may be specific to the mobi format, but since you have a Kindle you may have that problem too, I don't know.

[JoolsB]

Wow! When starting the thread I thought I might be the only person who thought this matters as a quick forum search for 'justification' had turned up nothing.

Thanks for all the feedback. I shall go and read the linked thread.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The best option is not to hard-code justification at all, and allow the user to select whichever form of justification they prefer.

But you cannot do that with ADE. It's either justified or it's not. There is no user choice unless the user edits the CSS.

[Elfwreck]

At 8-12 words/line, similar to paperbacks, full justification looks much nicer, and the extra spaces usually aren't distracting. At 4-6 words/line, which I sometimes use when my eyes get tired, full justification often results in annoying gaps between words.

When I'm making PDFs to fit my reader, I use left justification.

[GraceKrispy]

I prefer my pbooks to be fully justified. On a 6 in screen though, I like them to be left justified. I hear a lot of people who strongly desire full justification on ereaders though. I have had a few that were just bad- if you use a reasonable sized font (I'm not hard of seeing), it just seems there are too many uneven spaces. It's irritating to me to see what looks like 4 spaces in between words. Very distracting.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by simonroyle

For Kindle go with fully justified, and watch out for the BIG spaces.

But that's not how Kindle handles "BIG" spaces. Since the Kindle doesn't hyphenate (the merits of which, and the implementation of, would take another much longer thread), if the word spaces reach a certain point (two spaces?) it dumps all the extra space at the end of the line.

To a former professional typographer like myself, it ought to have us pulling our hair out. But, you know, the Kindle (and e-readers as a class) are not print on the page and virtually every typographic rule doesn't apply with ePub or mobi because there is no ability to define anything that matters to a typographer.

I much prefer full justification -- even on Kindle's terms -- to ragged right once you reach the number of letters per line the typical Kindle "page" delivers -- approximately the same as a pulp paperback. It's one of the annoyances I suffer with many ePubs for Kobo (although some titles come out fully justified so it's not the Kobo environment per se).