Blast you JSWolf (Jon?)!! I had things to do this morning but you made me go research the history of typesetting!! lol
Jon IS correct in that fully justified text was considered to be "professional" and left justified to be "amateurish". Amusingly however, that opinion was promulgated by none other than the typesetters guild - you know the guys that laboriously hand set the type to go on the printing presses. They would take pride in the fact that it took them several hours to properly space the words on a page to achieve the full justified effect.
It was also pretty comical that the articles that were written extolling the virtues of full justification were all....wait for it.....left justified!! lol
I don't think there is that sense of pride anymore since the same effect can be had with the click of a button. So to continue to say that left justified is amateurish is like saying "only peasants ride in anything less than 4 horses and 2 coachmen."
Aside from the obvious - that what you like to see is purely personal preference - there have been some arguments that the erratic spacing employed by full justification might unwantingly emphasize certain words over others and cause eye strain (no, I'm not kidding - full quote below).
I will concede that full justification CAN look better in a narrow multi-column document like a newspaper...but on most of today's devices/apps there just isn't the real estate available to make multi-column an acceptable solution (yes Faterson, except of course with Marvin on an iPad). For a single column full justification just doesn't make sense.
Here's a part of one of the articles I read - and the one I paraphrased above. It can be found
here.
(Emphasis added)
Quote:
On the typographic scene, there has been vivid discussion about whether range left or full justification is better(-looking). There is no conclusive, objective evidence for the superiority of one or the other; it is often considered a matter of preference. Preference, however, will not be discussed here. For more about the historical debate between advocates of justification and those who prefer left-aligned text, see Kinross (1994). Rather more important is the effect of full justification on readability. In a recent article, Stiff (1996) discusses the large number of factors that should be considered and the intricate relationship between them with regard to function rather than to aesthetic preference. Unlike the way such discussions are traditionally introduced, Stiff asks why anyone would choose to justify text. He states that the motivation of many typographers is simply that unjustified text is considered second-rate or careless. This view seems to have arisen from very strong conventions; it is just ‘not done’ to print a book unjustified, because it was not done like that before. Reading performance (readability), however, has not been found to be better for either justified or flush left text (Fabrizio, 1967; Hartley and Burnhill, 1971). An exception was found for poor readers; those people read unjustified text more quickly than justified text (Zachrisson, 1965; Gregory and Poulton, 1970).
It seems that the line endings of text receive much attention while in fact, word spacing and hyphenation seem to be the actual issues in the debate on justification (Hartley and Mills, 1973). No two lines of text are of equal length when letter spacing and word spacing are kept constant, even after crafty hyphenation. Therefore, for justification it is left to computer software to provide optimally balanced, variable spacing where this was done by hand in earlier times (a laborious process). As a result, readers will not grow accustomed to one and the same amount of space that signals the beginning of each new word or a uniform distance between letters within a word. Kinross (1994) argues that even if full justification is not found to affect readability, certain words might be emphasized unwantingly as a result of word spacing that is wider than the spacing between words elsewhere in the text. Also, it can be readily assumed that some readers will experience discomfort with variable spacing and frequent hyphenation. This effect will probably hardly be noticeable for wide text blocks; full justification is sooner permissible in such a case than when narrow columns of text are used. This, however, touches upon the topic of line width, which will be given attention shortly. Before turning to this aspect of typography, some less common kinds of justification will be discussed.
|