Justification (typesetting)

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In typesetting, justification is the setting of text or images within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin. Text set this way is said to be "justified".

The following paragraph is justified.

In justified text the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyphs or letters, are stretched or sometimes compressed in order to make the text align with both the left and right margins. When using justification it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph separately by left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.

The terms Justification and alignment are not synonymous. The error stems from the menu structure of the word processor Microsoft Word, which places "Left", "Right", "Full" and "Centered" as choices beneath the menu item "Justification." Typographers, typesetters and graphic designers maintain that this is incorrect. "Justification" refers only to a setting of type aligned on both the left and right margins. The compounds "left/right/center/full-justified" are all incorrect. Correctly speaking there are four recognized typographic alignments:

  • Centered
  • Flush left (verbosely "flush left, ragged right")
  • Flush right (verbosely "flush right, ragged left")
  • Justified

Justification sometimes leads to typographic anomalies. When the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear. Rivers appear in right-aligned, left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to flow in justified text due to the inconsistent word spacing.

Another problem occurs when using justification in narrow columns, when exceptionally large spaces appear between only two or three words (called a loose line). This can be solved by hyphenating long words or rewriting the text to use smaller words.

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History

Justification has been the preferred setting of type in many western languages through the history of moveable type. Its use has only waned somewhat since the middle of the 20th century through the advocacy of the typographer Jan Tschichold's book Asymmetric Typography and the freer typographic treatment of the Bauhaus, Dada, and Russian constructivist movements.

Not all "flush left" settings in traditional typography were created equal. In flush left text, words are separated on a line by the minimum word spacing built into the font. Continuous casting typesetting systems such as the Linotype were able to reduce the jaggedness of the right-hand side by inserting self-adjusting spacebands between words to evenly distribute white space, taking excess space that would have occurred at the end of the line and redistributing it between words.

This feature was available in traditional dedicated typesetting systems but is absent from most if not all desktop publishing systems. Graphic designers and typesetters using desktop systems adjust word and letter spacing, or "tracking", on a manual line-by-line basis to achieve the same effect. 

When a monospaced font is used, there is a way to justify text without inserting
extra spaces. Careful word choice allows the author to write lines approximating
eighty characters each, creating the close equivalent of justified typesetting.
Since many words in English mean the same thing but are different lengths, trial
and error can produce ideal line lengths.
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