
River (Typography) - keiferski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)
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throwaway3157
The caption of one of the article's images says "Czech proofreader's marks for
a river". Does this mean that points were deducted for a student
unintentionally creating a river? The article does not elaborate

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keiferski
There is a section which talks about the (perceived) negatives of rivers. In
short: it makes the text harder to read.

> Typographers try to minimize or eliminate the river effect. In Finer Points
> in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type, Canadian typographer Geoffrey Dowding
> explains as follows.

> A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of
> black separated by horizontal channels of white space. Conversely, in a
> slovenly setting the tendency is for the page to appear as a grey and
> muddled pattern of isolated spats, this effect being caused by the over-
> widely separated words. The normal, easy, left-to-right movement of the eye
> is slowed down simply because of this separation; further, the short letters
> and serifs are unable to discharge an important function—that of keeping the
> eye on "the line". The eye also tends to be confused by a feeling of
> vertical emphasis, that is, an up & down movement, induced by the relative
> isolation of the words & consequent insistence of the ascending and
> descending letters. This movement is further emphasized by those "rivers" of
> white which are the inseparable & ugly accompaniment of all carelessly set
> text matter.

