Text alignment in Sigil
 

I've been using Sigil for a couple of months in preparation for launching a few e-books and am very impressed by its capabilities. I seem to have got to grips with most of the things I require, however I'm wondering if it's possible to set text range left / ragged right, rather than default forced justified? I've seen range left text on a number of e-books, and usually prefer this setting.

Does Sigil allow for this?

I know of no forced default. All my Sigil-built epubs are left-aligned (ragged right) unless specifically told to be justified. Perhaps it's the device/app it's being viewed on that forces justified text by default?

See the Icons that look like pages ? Left,Centered,Right, JUSTIFIED

But IMHO, you should be using a style sheet (and styles :D ) for the bulk of you work and maybe, just maybe, use the style icons for limited use styling (:bulb2: You could borrow the code part (in CV) and create a your_named style with it. deleting the SGC style out of the HTML head)

Please, do not left justify. It looks amateurish and most people do not like left justified. They want full justified. Please go with the people and go full justified.

Left Justified look proper when using a Rickety_Old_Typewriter font :p
Decisions: Royal or Underwood :chinscratch:

Selectric

With the OCR-A ball?

It's a matter of taste. Some readers give ugly word spacing when full-justifing. It's often a reader option too.

This might be one of the many parameters (like font size, font style) that it's best to leave to the reader rather than trying to manage yourself. Quite a mental leap for anyone used to meticulously laying out a printed page!

Any ball you want.

Some Readers/software/apps do not allow you to change the justification outside the CSS. Desktop ADE does not. So anyone reading with ADE on a desktop or laptop won't be able to change the justification unless the CSS is accessible. But, ADE 2.0 does support hyphenation and it will look awful (IMHO) with left justification given that it has hyphenation support.

If you can leave it up to the reader, then set the default for justified for those that have no choice. The others can decide what they want.

For example, ADE on older Sony Readers did not support full justification and a lot of people stuck with BBeB (LRF) because of this. They wanted full justification.

Thanks for the replies; I didn't notice the text alignment options in the tool bar, so I appreciate that being pointed out. Many thanks.

What alignment for your book have you chosen?

Personally I can't stand justified text - there are too many awkward spaces in the words just so it can fill a line. It is much better and easier on the eye to have standard spacing between words. When you get to the end of a row then your eye goes to the next row... It's not like we are running out and need to conserve pixels! :)

If the reader wants a different alignment then they can select it in their device/app. If their device/app can't override the publisher's default then the customer needs to a) get a better reader, or b) live with the default left justification.

To assume that everyone wants/prefers justified text is silly...IMHO

Now, if a customer specifically requests, or a publisher requires, a particular alignment then by all means you give it to them!
Cheers!

But the problem is that a number of Readers/reading apps/programs do not allow changing the alignment. So by going left justified, you'd be doing a disservice to more people then you'd be doing a service.

You have to make a choice when the eBook is created. It has to be justified or left justified. You cannot have both. The better choice is justified. If you have a Reader or app/program that allows overriding the set justification, then you can have it left justified. But more people like full justified then left justified.

I would be interested to know what scientific analyses produced the result that "most people prefer justified."

The vast majority of people that I know and talked to about this prefer left justified. If you look at 100 web pages I would be surprised if you could find 10 that were justified. I doubt you could find ANY blogs or forums that are justified (this one is certainly left-justified).

Personally I don't care what publishers do - I have a device/app that let's me override. But for those who don't, then a) they need to "vote with their feet" and show those device manufacturers that we have standards ;) or b) since they are already willing to give up control of how their books are displayed then they should accept the default to the way text is normally displayed - left justified.