Full justification in Reader view
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Using the new experimental CSS support, I could enable full justification on all web pages by default. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in the Reader mode. It would be awesome if you could add an option to enable fully justified text in the Reader view, too.
Thank you.
PS: Applies to the mobile version, too
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@fruchtenstein Isn’t that a bad idea? Justifying text will lead to horrible results, because you will get large spaces between words. The typesetting in HTML and CSS isn’t good enough to do a proper job. No hyphenation, no adjustments for text boundaries depending on font in use, character, or punctuation. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10‐foot pole.
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@luetage, thank you for your response. I have often heard about poor readability of fully justified text, but IMHO this is a matter of culture and language. You see, the typographic conventions and traditions in different countries have different positions on justification and hyphenation. Shorter English words looks worse when hyphenated. On the other hand, in Russian, longer words produce paragraphs with the right edge being too uneven, making it even less readable than fully justified.
Full justification is really bad when a paragraph is narrow. Given that in the Reader view we can customize the text width, this is not the case. -
Does it look that bad?
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@fruchtenstein It looks better than expected, but it doesn’t look good and it certainly doesn’t make the text easier to read. I was surprised it did the hyphenation, but it didn’t do it correctly. The hyphen should in truth go slightly over the boundary of the justified text to give the paragraph a more even look. That’s one thing CSS probably can’t do, but which is common place in real typesetting. Anyway, I don’t wanna talk this feature request down, if people want their text in reader mode to be fully justified, more power to them.
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@luetage Thanks. After all, English speakers grew up on fully justified books, too, and they may like some resemblance to a book page
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As for the exact hyphen position, it may vary. In Gutenberg's times, since the text had to fit a wooden box, hyphens had to fit the same fixed line length. Now, we often see marginal hyphens, positioned completely outside the text box on the right margin. The latter would be perfect, but even the basic Gutenbergish CSS justification is more pleasing to the eye of an avid book reader IMHO...
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@fruchtenstein In Pali there are some very long compound words that need manual hyphenation points with a soft hyphen. I still use left justification on my sites, because the line length is intentionally short for easier reading.
Nevertheless, I see no harm in having an option to fully justify text in Reader View. It would make text easier to read more often than not.