Re: highlighting and fontification

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

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Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:
> François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Let's take the simultaneous left-right justification.  It has been
>> demonstrated that for fixed width fonts, it hurts legibility and
>> decreases reading speed.

> Does somebody have more info about this?  I've heard the claim that
> justification decreased legibility of texts written in fixed-width fonts
> many time, but I've never seen an explanation on why that is so, or a
> reference to research.

Left-right justification, when done with word choice and careful attention
to line length, should be as legible as normal ragged-right text.  Perhaps
slightly more legible because it's aesthetically pleasing; that's a matter
of personal taste.  When it is done by inserting more white space into the
text, however, it disrupts the normal flow of inter-word spacing, which is
highly distracting for the reader's eye.  We're used to inter-word spacing
being uniform throughout the text; extra spacing stands out, causes longer
pauses in reading, and sets off as specially significant breaks which have
no special meaning.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>