Full Justified or Left Justified?

[piperclassique]

I want to be right, and justified at the same time.
Apache

Ah, that would be faith, not works

[m00min]

I find my preference depends on the type size and line length. Small type and short lines are better set left aligned. The ragged edge makes it easier to keep track of where you are.

I'm a bit undecided on which I prefer for ebook reading. I've currently got my reader set to left aligned and auto hyphenate off, as I find excessive hyphenation distracting. If I could switch that off without then being subjected to massive gaps in the text I'd probably keep ebooks justified.

[Geralt]

Full justified. It looks neat.

[Apache]

To be truthful, I prefer left justified. But, it really does not matter when I am reading a book. I am not conscious of anything on the page. I do not see the text. I am inside my head watching a movie on my virtual theater screen (brain).
Apache

[Geralt]

Originally Posted by Apache

To be truthful, I prefer left justified. But, it really does not matter when I am reading a book. I am not conscious of anything on the page. I do not see the text. I am inside my head watching a movie on my virtual theater screen (brain).
Apache

Happens with a good book.
But if I read a bad or boring one, I notice everything else too.

Tiny preference for left aligned. Overall it doesn't matter, but I find it annoying when a really big word falls at the end of the line and it feels like my eyes are jumping across chasms every time it reaches a space. But the words are usually small enough that the small variations in the size of a space doesn't matter.

[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by Apache

To be truthful, I prefer left justified. But, it really does not matter when I am reading a book. I am not conscious of anything on the page. I do not see the text. I am inside my head watching a movie on my virtual theater screen (brain).
Apache

The problem is bad formatting can pull some of us out of that immersion. For me loose lines do it. The words are too far apart, the kerning, if poor enough, makes letters too far apart as well. A ragged right side doesn't do that to me.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by derangedhermit

To be specific, I counted. <50 characters per line is clearly better left justified, and >60 characters per line, I prefer full justified.

Right.
Text with too short lines is difficult to read, because the eye has to jump often and full justification produces very weird articacts.
Text with too long lines can be very uncomfortable. Your eye won't be able to find the next line when you finish previous one. Just open a text on a full length of a 24 inch monitor and you will clearly see what I am talking about.

In printed books, [the average of] 56 characters on line is considered to be THE ideal number of characters for the best readability. Most sources that do study the optimal length of the line of text say that the value should be somewhere between 50 and 75 characters. Just grab a well formatted paper book and count.
When the text is this long, a fully justified text can look much neater and the variation in inter-word space width is not distracting. For this to work really well, you need hyphenation (that surprisingly high number of e-ink readers do not support at all!) and a well made program to do the layout *and* it still has to be looked at and hand-tweaked by a skilled typographer.

For shorter line length and missing hyphenation and ridiculously wide margins and font size that can't be finely tuned and non-existent typographic tuning of spaces in software(such as inDesign or LaTeX have) - which is, sady, the description that fits many of modern e-ink devices - the left justification is better.


The best solution would be to let the user choose. I can't understand why there is no such choice for most of the reading devices "out there". Even such well configurable device as PocketBook, or great third-party programs installable on some readers, such as Coolreader, this has to be set by configuring it in a text configuration file or CSS override file.

[PurpleStar]

I prefer it right justified. Left just looks too messy to me.

[Lemurion]

For me it's simple enough:

Full justification done well: best option for prose
Ragged Right: Acceptable but not perfect option for prose
Full justification done poorly: worst option for prose

[Solitaire1]

When given a choice, I prefer left justified. While full justification is acceptable with small fonts and/or a large screen to avoid the large gaps between the words, left justification works better with a smaller screen and/or larger fonts.

Since others have commented on paragraph spacing, when given the option I prefer a blank line between the paragraphs with a visible marker between the sections, and no first-line indent. Other ways are fine, but this is the one I prefer.

[Ozymango]

I'm enjoying learning from all the responses here, very fascinating thread.

As for me, I lean towards a ragged right border (left align), it's just a bit "easier on my eyes." But it's not a huge deal, just a preference.

And to me one of the hands-down coolest things about e-books is that I can choose to justify text, left align, right align, center align ... whatever I prefer at the moment. Ain't technology grand? :-)

[Gregg Bell]

I feel like the Vice President.

Left. Justified's not normal in an e-book. All those white spaces, hyphenations etc. Read the words as they come, as they should be. Left.

[4691mls]

I really don't care about the alignment of chapter headings, just as long as there aren't too many of them. Books that have 100+ chapters when the whole book is only a few hundred pages long - now that bugs me.


OOPS I meant to post this in the thread about chapter title alignment. Going over there now

[Ripplinger]

And we're back to a 50/50 split once again at 75 each, which is really what I expected to see.