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Dan Goldstein reports: <<Leah Guren posted the following to the
Techshoret list about two years ago: "All usability data shows
overwhelming that a ragged (natural) right makes it easier to read and
follow the text. Some of the research dates to the mid-70s (Hartely &
Burnhill, Designing Instruction Text), but the most compelling data
came from Marlana Coe (UCLA) and E.R. Misanchuk in several different
studies done in the 90s.">>
I rarely disagree with Leah, but I have to say that this statement is
nonsense as written. It's true in the absolute sense only if you
restrict your discussion to full justification without hyphenation,
where you can end up with horrible rivers, and it's arguably true if
the context is (as noted in the quoted excerpt) early-90s automated
justification in Word and other word processors.
But I defy anyone to produce a well-controlled study in which properly
typeset justified text is significantly more difficult to read than the
ragged-right equivalent. All the studies I have seen compared apples
and oranges, and the differences were statistically but not practically
significant when the justified text was set by someone who understood
typography.
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