Some fonts, such as Adobe Garamond Pro, retain hyphens in their original form those hyphens look more like the diagonal stroke of a calligrapher’s pen than a straight horizontal line. Hyphens and dashes are confused to the point that they are now used almost interchangeably by some. Don’t confuse these with the hyphen (-), which isn’t a dash at all but a punctuation mark. Most fonts are equipped with at least two dashes: an en dash (–, –, which is the width of a lowercase “n”) and an em dash (-, -, which is the width of a lowercase “m”). The typist may wish to continue using two spaces after a period, but the typographer should not.
Adding yet another space merely pokes a hole in the body text and interrupts the flow of reading.
#EM DASH EXAMPLES FULL#
It also keeps the text block even.įor those who are still skeptical, consider this: the beginning of a new sentence is already indicated by a period, a full space and a capital letter. One space after a period is plenty to signal the end of a sentence. Now that computers (and the fonts on them) are equipped with proportionally spaced (rather than monospaced) fonts, this practice is outdated, and it creates awkward breaks in the body text. Because early typewriters used monospaced fonts (meaning that the spaces between letters were always the same length), typists used two spaces to mimic the slightly wider spaces that typesetters were using after periods. The practice began when typewriters were introduced. This practice is a holdover from typographers of the Victorian era. Very few typographic debates match the intensity of whether there should be one or two spaces after a sentence. At the optimal line length for reading (about 50 to 80 characters or 8 to 15 words), making lines of text all the same length, without hyphenation or subtle letter spacing, nearly always results in rivers. This makes justified text on the Web highly susceptible to big holes and rivers in the body text.Īvoiding justified type on the Web is generally a good idea. Beyond JavaScript libraries that handle hyphenation and CSS3’s text-justify property, browsers don’t have very sophisticated measures for maintaining an even texture in blocks of text. very slightly adjusting the width of individual letters) to produce an even texture in the body copy.īut there is no hyphenation control in CSS. They use a combination of letter spacing, word spacing, hyphenation and glyph scaling (i.e. High-end desktop publishing applications (such as Adobe InDesign) have sophisticated systems for justifying type so that it doesn’t produce “rivers” (large gaps in the text from too much word spacing). This changes the overall texture of the body copy, making it less even. the space between letters), and word spacing (the space between words) is done to lengthen and shorten lines. Because all lines have to be set at the same length, some variation in letter spacing (i.e. Justified text is spaced out so that each line is of the same length. Hyphenation should not be used with text that is flush left, because that would defeat the whole point of a ragged right. Additionally, studies have shown that readers score higher in comprehension and recall when text is flush left. This is generally considered easier to read because the eye can better distinguish one line from the next, because of the different line lengths. In text set flush left, the lines will break naturally, resulting in a “ragged” right side of the column. Because the Web allows for less typographic control, justified type usually creates rivers and big gaps in blocks of text.
Text set flush left (or ragged-right) creates an even texture and is easier to read. Indenting the opening paragraph of a new section would be redundant, because that paragraph would be the first in that page or section anyway.Ī full line break of 1 em (like when you hit the “Return” key twice) is generally more than enough to signal a new paragraph.
Indent the first line of a new paragraph about 1 em (if your font size is 12px, then that would amount to 12 pixels). Doing both is redundant and creates awkward, irregular chunks of white space. When signalling the end of a paragraph and the beginning of another, you can generally either indent or insert a space between the paragraphs. Here are a few ways to make your blocks of text nice and clean. Good typography comes down to communicating information, and the basis of information is good old-fashioned body copy – simple blocks of text.
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