Re: Using ragged right in technical publications

Subject: Re: Using ragged right in technical publications
From: Chuck Martin <cmartin -at- SEEKERSOFT -dot- COM>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 11:21:55 -0700

I have not read the book and may not anytime soon, only because the reading
material ahead of it stacks too high. (It looks fascinating though.)

A queation that I do have from this post: How does the size of the book
relate to the ease or difficulty of creating clean text, that is, text
without rivers, without excessive hyphenation, and so on?

For those of us who work in the computer industry, I know we've seen a
large number of manuals in smaller formats, with large margins to boot.
(Then there are the people still toiling in enterprise situations, when
they are developing reams of 8.5" x 11" pages to stick in endless rows of
binders.) With justified text, is it more difficult to make text clean with
the narrow column width? Does it depend on the software used (word
processor vs. document processor vs. typeset)? Does it matter that very
often paragraphs are just 2 or 3 or 4 lines, especially in areas that
contain a lot of procedures?

Lotsa questions. I'm looking forward to see where the answers take us.

At 10:32 PM 9/16/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi folks,
>
>Holly Turner asked:
>
>Does anyone know why ragged right justification is used in almost all
>technical publications? A book I am reading, _Type & Layout_ by Colin
>Wheildon, references a study that indicates that readers comprehend
>fully justified text better than text set in ragged left or right. I
>can provide the actual percentages if anyone is interested.
>
>Does anyone know of other studies that prove this study wrong?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Holly Turner
>Technical Writer
>Harbinger Corp.
>
>====
>Holly,
>
>I review the study of typography that Wheildon sites and dozens of
>others in my book Dynamics in Document Design (Wiley, 1997). I hope my
>discussion will help you make sense of his claim that fully justified
>text is better than ragged right. As the research clearly shows (and i
>think Mr. Wheildon misses this point), the issue is NOT justification
>versus non-justification, that is, it is not ragged right vs. justified;
>rather, it is rivers or no rivers, bizarre word-spacing or not, and
>excessive hyphenation or not. Research shows that rivers, odd
>word-spacing, and excessive hyphenation slow readers down.
>Coincidentally, each of these factors is a typical artifact of fully
>justified text. However, note I said typical for it does not mean
>always. There are software programs that allow document designers to
>edit the wordspacing and hyphenation zones. When using programs that
>allow one to control for equal spaces between the words and for only one
>hyphen in a row, then one can achieve the same reading speed with
>justified text as with unjustified. It is important, in fact crucial,
>that documents designers think about the effects of their decisions on
>the reader and not to come up with arbitrary standards based on
>superficial readings of the research literature.
>
>good luck,
>
>karen schriver
>KSA, Document Design and Research
>
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>
--
"You don't look American"
"Everyone looks American, because Americans are from everywhere"
- Doonesbury
Chuck Martin
Technical Writer, Seeker Software, Inc | Personal
cmartin -at- seekersoft -dot- com | writer -at- grin -dot- net
www.seekersoft.com | www.grin.net/~writer

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