Justification, hyphenation, and the gaps between words
Set the same paragraph justified in a word processor and in a book, and the book wins in a way that is hard to point at. Both have straight edges on the left and the right. Both are the same words. One looks even and one looks patchy.
The difference is not the font, and it is not the paper. It is the method used to decide where the lines end.
One line at a time, or the whole paragraph
A word processor sets a justified paragraph greedily. It fills the first line with as many words as will fit, breaks, then starts again on the second line knowing nothing about the first. Each line takes the first fit available to it and moves on.
That is fast and it is local, and local decisions produce exactly the fault you see. A line that happened to fit one more short word is squeezed tight. The line under it, having been left with a long word it could not take, is stretched wide to reach the margin. The two sit next to each other and the contrast is visible from across a room.
A typesetter — a person or a program doing the job properly — treats the paragraph as one problem. It considers many possible sets of break points for the whole paragraph at once, scores each line by how far its spacing has to move from ideal, and chooses the arrangement with the lowest total cost. It will accept a slightly worse line three lines up in exchange for a much better line further down, because the total is what it is optimizing.
That single change of scope is most of what people mean by professional setting. Even color — the uniform grayness of a well-set block of text held at arm's length — is the result. Amateur pages are not badly spaced everywhere. They are well spaced in most places and badly spaced in a few, and the eye reads the inconsistency.
Hyphenation is the pressure valve
Justified lines have to reach the right margin, and the word spaces are what stretch to get them there. Every word break you allow is one more place a line is permitted to end, and so one more chance to end near the ideal length rather than well short of it.
Refuse to hyphenate and that pressure does not go away. It goes into the spaces, because there is nowhere else for it to go. Turning hyphenation off is the single most common cause of gaping word spaces and the pale channels running down through a paragraph that come with them. See Widows, orphans and rivers: the faults readers feel.
Hyphenation has its own costs. Words break in the wrong place if the language is set wrong. Hyphens stack down the right edge when several lines in a row break — three consecutive is the usual limit. And a hyphen on the last line of a page makes the reader carry half a word through a page turn.
Those costs are small and local. The cost of refusing to hyphenate is spread across every page.
In the Interior Formatter. Justification, hyphenation and the spacing band are settings, so you can pour the same chapter both ways and compare real pages rather than argue about it. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Measure is the constraint underneath all of it
The shorter the line, the fewer words on it, and the more of any shortfall each individual space has to absorb. A narrow measure set justified with hyphenation switched off cannot be set well by anyone. There is not enough material on the line to work with.
This is why the argument about hyphenation is really an argument about measure. On a wide line with sixty-five or seventy characters, the spacing has room to absorb a lot without showing. On a short line — a narrow trim, large type, a two-column recipe page — it does not. See Type size, leading and the line that reads well and Margins and gutters.
Ragged right is a decision, not a surrender
Set the text flush left and leave the right edge uneven, and every word space in the book is identical. The variation moves into the shape of the right edge, where it does no harm to reading.
That is the correct choice more often than novelists assume. A narrow measure wants it. So do low-vision readers, for whom irregular word spacing is an extra obstacle and a uniform, predictable gap between words is easier to track. Our Large Print edition is set ragged right for that reason, along with 16 pt type on a 6 × 9 page. See The large print edition most authors never make.
Verse is set ragged right by necessity, since the line breaks are the author's. See Setting poetry without wrecking it.
For a trade novel, justified remains what readers expect, and ragged right will read as a manuscript however clean it is.
What to check on a proof
Do not read for this. Reading hides it.
Run your eye straight down the page without reading the words. You are looking for one line noticeably looser than the lines above and below it. A single loose line in a column of even ones is the tell, and it is visible in about two seconds once you know to look.
Hold the spread at arm's length and let your focus go. The block should be evenly gray. Clots and light patches are spacing faults.
Check the right edge for hyphen ladders. Three hyphens in a row is a limit; four is a fault.
Read the first and last lines of every page. Broken words across a page turn are worth fixing by hand.
In the Interior Formatter. It breaks each paragraph as a whole rather than line by line, and can stretch or compress the letterforms very slightly to close a gap instead of opening a bad one — a change too small to see on its own letter, and clearly visible across a page. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Ligatures, kerning and small caps · Back to Type size, leading and the line that reads well · Also: Widows, orphans and rivers: the faults readers feel · Margins and gutters