The platform of newsletters Substack has launched this week the possibility of modifying the text alignment in posts, allowing your users to right justify. Many will have embraced the possibility because the column perfectly aligned on both sides seems more professional, more serious, more literary. However, that feeling has a very specific origin… and that origin has nothing to do with making texts more readable.
Why we like to square. There is something very human about equalizing the margins, and creating a clean, rectangular silhouette. This is the opposite of left-aligned text, which on the right ends where the last word of each line ends. The justified column, on the other hand, conveys order, control and a feeling that the text is more thought out.
But. On a screen, justification almost always hurts the reader. The reason has to do with something typographers call “typographic rivers”: When a word processor or web system extends lines to reach the right margin, it does so by widening the spaces between words. That widening is not uniform: it depends on how many words are on each line and creates stripes of white space that run diagonally across the text. It is a characteristic effect of right-justification and the eye perceives them as visual noise, with the consequent cognitive wear and exhaustion of the reader.
How we read. the eyes They don’t slide through text like a scannerbut they jump on the page. What researchers call saccades are small microreadings of between 7 and 9 characters, followed by stops (fixations) that last approximately 200 to 250 milliseconds, during which time the brain processes what it has just captured. During each fixation, the reader keeps his or her gaze on a group of words before making the next jump to the next fragment of text.
This leads to the irregular right margin being, counterintuitively, an aid to reading: that serrated silhouette serves as a visual anchor. The eye, upon finishing one line, needs to find the beginning of the next. The irregular pattern gives him clues, a kind of profile he recognizes. But if the right margin has the text perfectly justified, those clues are eliminated: all the lines end up the same, and jumping from one to another requires more tracing work. The uniform and predictable left margin of the text improves readability because the jump of the eye when moving from one line to another is inevitable, but it is preferable that the lines are uniform, without the aforementioned typographic rivers. Therefore, it is preferable that the inequalities fall at the ends of the lines, where they do not bother.
Complications for dyslexics. The justified text aggravates reading difficulties in dyslexic people, since the aforementioned typographical rivers break a rhythm that is already fragile with this ailment. Apparentlydyslexic readers use different visual sampling strategies than people who are not dyslexic, with longer fixations and shorter jumps, which makes their reading process more laborious. Any factor that adds irregularity to the spacing further complicates that process. That’s why the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) explicitly recommend avoiding full justification and require that if it is used, the user can disable it
How justification was born. Justified text emerged from something that could be described as Gutenberg’s vanitywho wanted his printing press to produce, paradoxically, texts indistinguishable from manual writing. The printer designed variants of his characters (slightly wider and slightly narrower versions) so that the lines of text always reached the full width of the type case, with no excess white space. The printed text needed to resemble hand-copied text to be accepted by society, since handwritten books were objects of religious and institutional authority, and the printing press had to earn that same status.
Gutenberg’s typographic practice made justified printing possible and that convention was established in the typographic styles that emerged from his workshop. What began as an imitation became a norm, and the norm became synonymous with editorial seriousness in the following centuries.
The job of adjusting. For five hundred years, justifying the text correctly was a craft. Typewriters controlled the exact width of the columns, adjusted the kerning, managed the division of words with syllabaries, and manually eliminated widow and orphan lines (those single lines that remain isolated at the beginning or end of a page). It was artisanal work and a poorly justified text in a professional printer was a sign of incompetence.
The processors arrive. These programs democratized justification in the 1980s and 1990s. Microsoft Word added the justification button and millions of people activated it without having the tools to use it well: no column width control, no syllabification dictionary activated, and no line spacing adjustment. The result is what anyone can see in a Word document justified with short lines: spaces between words that open grotesquely, typographical rivers evident even to untrained eyes…
And from there to the internet. The web inherited the habit. As pointed out by the Web Style Guidea classic web design reference, “modern browsers support justified text, but they do it through crude adjustments to word spacing,” without the sophistication it takes to get it right. The difference with a paper book is that in the physical format, the books are justified with acceptable results because the editor controls critical variables: the exact width of the text box, the body of the font, the line spacing, the automatic syllabification calibrated for specific fonts…
And that is where Substack may have gone too far, because it does not offer any of that: the width of the text of each device, the font size that each reader has configured in their browser, the resolution of the screen… What on a 27-inch monitor may have a reasonably tidy appearance, on a mobile phone with large letters occurs precisely the worst typographic scenario: short lines with few words and enormous spaces between them. Total chaos under the appearance of absolute order.
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