Justified versus ragged right? (take II)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

I stated that ragged-right text takes more space than full  
justification. Sean Brierley noted: <<I just tested this by making  
all my body text fully justified--don't want to do that with lists as  
the inter-word spacing could be huge. For a FrameMaker file, a  
chapter in my book, I saw no change in page count.>>

Did you take the time to adjust the hyphenation settings? Did you  
manually correct any line breaks? That makes a huge difference. If  
you try the same test in InDesign (which has a superb typesetting  
engine), you'll see the results instantly: switching to full  
justification visibly pulls more text onto the page. I see this all  
the time when I pass text from Word (largely ragged right) to  
InDesign: soon as I apply a fully justified paragraph style, text  
reflows onto the current page. There might be no difference if I  
manually hyphenated all ragged-right lines or set this to happen  
automatically using a good hyphenation dictionary. Haven't tested  
that, but it seems reasonable.

However, as you note: <<The reality in this case is that numbered  
lists, the occasional note, the many graphics, and other factors  
absorb any significant efficiency of justified text.>>

That's certainly true for many types of document. I was thinking of  
journal articles, novels, newspapers, and textbooks when I wrote my  
original response, and I didn't state that as my starting assumption.  
My bad.

<<Also, with regard to readability, don't you find that varying the  
space between words, even over a 5-inch text column, leads to the  
space between sentences becoming hidden ... and the full stop being  
less noticeable ... so perhaps (the dreaded) two spaces between  
sentences becomes appropriate?>>

Again, this depends entirely on the software you're using and whether  
you take time to tweak the hyphenation and justification settings.  
With InDesign, for instance, I find that apart from my obsessive  
desire to tweak the line breaks <g>, the spacing becomes sufficiently  
consistent that I don't even notice the spacing variations. With  
Word, the spacing variations are grossly obvious unless I tweak the  
paragraph settings carefully -- which is generally more work than I'm  
prepared to do. (I just pass the text to InDesign and let the  
software make it nice for me.)

----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
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