news@sun.UUCP (07/08/87)
Date: Tue, 7 Jul 87 10:55:48 PDT
From: dirk@words (Dirk van Nouhuys)
In a message on 4 May Robert McKay pointed out that desktop layout
tools are putting the layout process into the hands of folks
untrained in what makes a page readable or in graphic arts generally. I
certainly agree with that general point. The writer in the street now
has the power to make more mistakes. For example I agree that wider
columns need deeper leading. But I disagree with McKay about ragged
right. Robert Stanley brought some of these issues up again in a
message of July 1. Chris Jarocha-Ernst posted some research on July 1.
McKay speaks of a tradition of page composition, which gives valuable
guidance. The tradition is useful, but it carries some burdensome
baggage and in my view that includes right justification and hyphenation.
I did some library research on this a few years ago; I can't dredge up
the citations but they led me to believe that ragged right was easiest to
read. One thing I do remember is that the Journal of Ergonomics, where
some of this research was reported, is printed in short, ragged right lines.
In considering readability, note that reading is not such linear
process as McCluhan would have us imagine. Whatever the eye motion
involved, we often process whole sentences spread over many lines. To
show this to your self, read aloud a sentence that takes more than one
line and ends in a question mark. You will discover that you get the
intonation right. That is, your attention has picked up the question
mark and the location of the verb while you are still uttering the
first part of the sentence. Any experienced reader aloud knows you can
intone correctly sentences of several lines even though you have to
know the grammer of the end of the sentence when you speak the first
line.I believe this sort of scanning is what makes us able to tolerate
hyphenation at all, although hyphenation means scattering the parts of
a word over 3-6 inches of unrelated characters.
I also saw research on different type faces, usually sans serif versus
serif. This research unfortunately used very brief passages, the sort
of thing you read at a glance, and so is not so useful in evaluating
how to print manuals. It showed that, in brief passages, things written
in sans were more memorable, that is why our highway sings are sans
serif. I don't believe that is true for longer passages, but maybe that
is a religious opinion. The most interesting result was was a positive
correlation between how much readers liked a type face and how much
they retained reading it.
I think the main reason for right justification is tradition in the bad
sense. Once upon a time paper, or the equivalent, was expensive and
scribes contorted readability and even sense to cut costs. Anyone who
has read a medieval MS of poetry written margin to margin regardless of
metrics will know what I mean. Think of a computer program filling a
page with full justification. Programmers, starting out fresh, have
chosen a more readable format.
So I remain convinced that the best thing to do with hyphenation is
forget the whole idea. That goes doubly for computer manuals where -
may mean various other things and triply for algorithmic hyphenation
that makes howlers as quoted by Stanley.
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