Justified text is laid out so that the left and right sides of the text block each have a clean edge. The alternative is left-aligned text, which has a ragged right edge.
Justification works by adding white space between the letters and words in each line to make all the lines the same length. This alters the ideal spacing of the typeface, but on paragraphs with long lines it’s usually not noticeable.
Section 351 extends the time in which to file suit if the defendant was outside California when the action accrued or leaves the state after it accrued. It reads, “If, when the cause of action accrues against a person, he is out of the State, the action may be commenced within the term herein limited, after his return to the State, and if, after the cause of action accrues, he departs from the State, the time of his absence is not part of the time limited for the commencement of the action.”
Section 351 extends the time in which to file suit if the defendant was outside California when the action accrued or leaves the state after it accrued. It reads, “If, when the cause of action accrues against a person, he is out of the State, the action may be commenced within the term herein limited, after his return to the State, and if, after the cause of action accrues, he departs from the State, the time of his absence is not part of the time limited for the commencement of the action.”
However, be careful with shorter lines—the extra space for the justification can visibly distort the word spacing. Also beware of awkward hyphenation.
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Left-aligned text
Section 351 extends the time in which to file suit if the defendant was outside California when the action accrued or leaves the state after it accrued. It reads, “If, when the cause of action accrues against a person, he is out of the State, the action may be commenced within the term herein limited, after his return to the State, and if, after the cause of action accrues, he departs from the State, the time of his absence is not part of the time limited for the commencement of the action.” |
Justified text
Section 351 extends the time in which to file suit if the defendant was outside California when the action accrued or leaves the state after it accrued. It reads, “If, when the cause of action accrues against a person, he is out of the State, the action may be commenced within the term herein limited, after his return to the State, and if, after the cause of action accrues, he departs from the State, the time of his absence is not part of the time limited for the commencement of the action.” |
Justification gives text a slightly more formal look. How and when you use it is largely a matter of taste. Personally, I almost never justify text—typeface designers put a lot of thought into the space between letters and words. Why disrupt their work?
Matthew, unless I am mistaken, any decent software which carries out justification will only change the inter-word, rather than the inter-letter spacing. Whilst I agree with you that the latter should not be disrupted, surely control of the former is one of the traditional skills of the compositor? After-all, fine typography from the Gutenberg Bible to the Doves Bible [http://ilovetypography.com/img/the-doves-bible.jpg] has always used justified the text (preferably with hanging punctuation, too!).
Keep up the good work!
My objections to justified text are largely personal taste. While you are right that a skilled type compositor can do a nice job with it, I consider the MS Word justification just barely competent.
AFAIK, the MS Word hyphenation & justification (H&J) rules are “dumb” in the sense that they just set the type line by line. A smart H&J is going to look forward & backward so that a loose line doesn’t immediately precede a tight line, etc.
The Complete Manual of Typography by James Felici has a whole chapter on the science of justification. Suffice it to say that Word and WP are never going to offer the H&J control of, say, InDesign, so I can’t get too worked up about it.
Would “even” or “straight” perhaps be more exact terms than “clean” in the first sentence?
As a matter of personal taste, I dislike justified text because it makes documents difficult to read. Though the appearance is cleaner, the uniformity of justified text makes it harder for the eye to keep track of which line is next.
As of Bringhursts The Elements of Typographic Style, the exact opposite has proven itself over centuries—justified, proper set text provides better track of the line-jumping than ragged text. (Provided, I understood the text properly)
Bringhurst does not proclaim justified text to be superior in every situation. He does however recommend a method for typesetting justified text that involves altering not only the spaces between words and letters, but also the shapes of the letters themselves. His book uses this technique, and it works quite well. But trying to accomplish this in Word would be like teaching calculus to a first-grader.
Full justification looks better.
The quality of the justification in Word can be improved enormously by going to Tools|Options|Compatibility and putting a check in the box for “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows.” (This works for Word 2003, anyway; I can’t vouch for other versions.)
The improvement is not subtle.
It will still be necessary to go through and hyphenate by hand to tighten up lines where the gaps between words are still too big.
Further to Neal’s advice - Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows exists in Word 2007 - although it obviously has to go under the circular Office menu button at the top left since the Tools menu is gone. Word Options > Advanced > Compatibility.
but gutenberg had several types – as in the metal pieces – of different widths for letters so it’s no wonder his justified texts looked better
Full justification is inadvisable for legal documents. It givesan aura of artifice and artificiality. It is pretentious and smacks of disingeneousness. Eschew it.
If you are going to use full justification and expect it to look professional, you are also going to have to be unafraid to break (hyphenate) words at the ends of lines. Nothing makes full justification look more amateurish than to have big spaces between words. These big spaces also reduce readability.
And words need to be broken in the proper places.
I suspect that many of the objections raised about full justification are based on observations of poorly “set” lines (whether in Word or WordPerfect) in which the typist has refused to break words or has done a poor job of breaking words.
If you are going to refuse to break words, then left justify your lines.
If you have proper typesetting - in other words, if you send everything out to a professional printer - then I may well agree with you that full justification ‘looks better’; however, you probably use Microsoft Word. The way that white space is dealt with by MSWord is horrible and allows huge gaping chasms between words. This leaves your text unreadable to an estimated 10-15% (figures vary between countries, but the US is at the top of the range) of the total adult population.
I know there are plenty of people who will say, “Well, it’s unlikely that highly-educated lawyers fall within this group.” But, there are two points about that: one, your client might not be as smart as you (I know you already think s/he’s not); and, two, despite having two Masters degrees (MSc and MA), I’m in that group.
As a graphic designer, one thing I truly hate is seeing hyphenation in ragged text. The whole point of ragged text is that some lines are going to be shorter than others so to have a hyphen at the end of the line looks incredibly sloppy.
oh dear, I hate hate hate HATE left-justified text. It looks so unfinished, unpolished, unprofessional, sloppy. I find it hard-to-read, and annoying. I don’t care at all about the differences in spaces between words with fully justified text (unless they are gaping, that is an obvious problem).