> The justification notion, I would argue that the typical user may not notice it as much as the hardcore reader.
The fact of the matter is it impacts all readers, whether they recognize it or not, and there is a reason the printing industry generally doesn't do it.
At what point would you acknowledge that maybe the large number of people who think they prefer full justification... actually prefer full justification?
containing numerous links to academic papers showing lower test scores with right justification. I don't know if the author cherry picked only the articles favoring the authors opinion.
(edited to add, also try googling for the topic and "Dyslexia" where the conclusions seem fairly non-controversial and realize dyslexia is a spectrum disorder)
This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.
On the side of left justification, it looks better, there seems to be at least some scientific data it reads better, and the argument why its easier and better to read makes sense. On the side of right justification we have crickets.
Perhaps there's a patent on displaying left justified text on an ebook, and merely by ruining the product by right justification, the patent can be avoided.
> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.
If ugly line endings even make your list of "things in my life that could be going better," you're living a pretty charmed life. :)
Ah but stuffing my house with original paintings by the dutch masters would be somewhat expensive, compared to what boils down to a fairly obvious very small software bug fix. That's the truly interesting part, the ratio of effort to improve vs results of improvement.
(edit to add, its like living in an area plagued by vandalism)
Interesting. There certainly seems to be a bit of cherry-picking in the author's quotes. From the abstract of the first article
"Thirty-two poor readers were then tested with the same material arranged in longer lines averaging 12 words, and no disadvantage of justification was found."
So the only time that there was any evidence of poor comprehension in that study was with very short lines - 7 words per line - and with poor readers.
The third one was published in 1991, and again seems to be based on narrow lines - 4 column newspaper. And if the examples on page 29 are anything to go by, it's potentially also based on fixed space type - and I'm not going to argue with anyone about justified text with a fixed space type looking poor.
> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life
But if you don't notice it, then you presumably don't think it's ugly.
+1 for that study summary, that's very interesting.
As for aesthetics, the reason for right justification in the first place is that when done correctly it looks nicer. Unfortunately it's hard to do correctly.
I sincerely doubt that there's a patent on left justified text, since that's the most obvious way to display text. I hope you were just kidding.
The issue isn't justification--it's justification without hyphenation. Books with justified text almost always break lines using hyphens. The Kindle doesn't do this, and that's what creates the "rivers" of white space.
Sorry, I guess I shouldn't make generalizations about the entire printing industry. There's a segment of the market where they don't do it. For other markets, not so much.
The fact of the matter is it impacts all readers, whether they recognize it or not, and there is a reason the printing industry generally doesn't do it.