Hrvoje Niksic writes: > François Pinard 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)