Opinions on text layout

Fully Justified or Left Justified?

[dmorison]

Subject and meta says it all really. From a purely visual point of view I currently fully justify the main body text of my pages. However I notice that this practice is not that common. If you look at the marketing blurb on the websites of top companies you will rarely see fully justified text.

Is left justified _so much_ easier on the reader? I'm ready to be converted...

[chris_f]

dmorison,

I personally prefer left justified text. I think there are several reasons people mainly use left justified text. Some that I can think of are below:

1. Absolute browser compatibility. (including special needs and text only browsers)
2. It's the norm.
3. Lazy coding ;)
4. Less data transfer (as left is the default)

Chris

[tlibson]

In print, most marketing type and book type is left-justified for a reason -- it helps the reader track line position and so it makes reading less work. Since reading on a screen is harder than reading printed text, I'd say there is even more reason to do whatever you can to keep your text "reader-friendly."

[pageoneresults]

I'll agree with those who have replied thus far and will add...

Be very careful when using the justify attribute on paragraphs. Justification does not display correctly across all browsers. And, there are times where you will get lines that stretch to justify and it looks like you've added letter-spacing:5px. Not a good design techinique for the web. In print it is a different story.

[Jenstar]

I agree that you should not use anything but left-justified text. I was reading a couple of articles yesterday - one was justified, and one was centered. Both were a complete pain to read, and I never finished reading either one.

Reading online is completely different from reading something as a hard copy. If you are thinking of doing justified because people will likely be printing it out, do a "printer friendly" version of the page (be sure to disallow robots to read the printer friendly version) and justify that version only, but leave the regular online version as left-justified for ease of reading.

[tlibson]

Let's keep in mind that the only (traditional) reasons for justifying text left and right are:
1) the art director likes the look
2) you're trying to squeeze a lot of text into too-little space.

Word processors and their ilk often don't compress type to fit a tight space. They simply aadd spacing to fill the line, so they don't save any space at all.