In praise of a pretty line
RogerBlack.com currently pulls off something extraordinary: they justify their body text, and it comes out ok without hyphenation!
By using Georgia – quite condensed, compared to Verdana – at a small size with abundant line-height, they get much less space between words than between lines, even without hyphenating words.
Specs:
font-family: Georgia; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px; text-align: justify;
This results in more than 70 characters per line.
Links
(open in new windows):
Kids: don't try this at home....
A line that's pretty to look at isn't necessarily easy to read or scan. Georgia at 13 pixels is good enough for young eyes, if you really want to read it. That's fine for RogerBlack.com, but other websites may have different audiences and goals. (The red background is a clue that this is a special case.)
Justification
We justify text mainly to make the page look pretty. (I presume there's also a small readability benefit that it's clear from the end of the line whether you're at the end of a paragraph.)
The harms justification can cause are wide word spacing and 'rivers': vertical or diagonal white streaks created by the excess word space connecting over several lines. Hyphenation is generally necessary (but not sufficient) to avoid the problems.
Modern software (InDesign) can produce extraordinary lines of text for print. Alas, the switch to lcd monitors has kept screen resolution far too low for fine control of type.
Copyright © 1998-2011 J. R. Boynton