Drawar

On the web I can't stand to read justified text, it is almost impossible to scan and many times the justified text isn't the only thing on the page so it is key to make it easy to follow. Justified can only work when it is the only thing on a page, like a book. Maybe in use for blockquotes, but that is as far as I can see it being used.

Agreed, hyphenation is what makes justified text readable. Left-aligned, or "ragged right" as I call it, is generally far more readable.

One reason it is more readable is that the eye has a better idea of where you are on the page. The right edge acts as a landscape, with subtle clues that are like geographic features, helping you know where you are.

I prefer it even in print, unless I have a real design case for making it justified.

Thanks for pointing this out, folks. I never thought about it before.

Looking around the web, though, it's clear that a big majority of the sites I respect avoid full justification like the plague. Needless to say, I just switched my blog's text alignment left and, while it will take a bit of getting used to for me, it does seem to read better.

I'm not big on justified unless it's blockquotes. I am dyslexic myself and find it rather annoying when people play about with word formatting too much online. I have an oddly passionate hatred for center alignment also but not sure where that comes from - it just always looks wrong and bad to me.

@karmatosed: How do you feel about headings that are center-aligned (like on A List Apart)? Is centering always a problem for you or is it mainly an issue when large blocks of text are centered?

Haha, when I read this I immediately thought of Scrivs telling me to that the justified text on one of my NTG designs lol. For me it looked fine but for him it was awful. That's why I suggest not using it because different users experience different things.

What if you use the word-spacing property? Does it help?

Crap...the entire main content of my blog is justified. No wonder few people come back and read or miss out important parts completely. I thought it just looks neater with having justified texts.

My site uses justified text...most of the time. Like Kamigoroshi, I thought/think it looks neater.

Justified can work online.

The problem surrounds browsers not getting the kerning perfect and also not truncating words. This is a performance hand-off because apparently rendering things perfectly would just steal too many CPU cycles... I doubt that's entirely true with today's computers but there's a reason, nonetheless.

Personally, I'm not a fan of truncation for the sake of justified text but there is another technique that can make it readable: line-height.

Justified is scorned because it can lead to "rivers" of whitespace running vertically down through your text. This knackers the readability. If you add enough line-height, you get around problems like that.

This doesn't solve the occasions where you have far too much spacing when you're dealing with big words, but it's a start.

Justified text on the web is the devil. It can be tempting, but I've only ever seen it used well on a handful of occasions. I'll try to dig some up and link them here.

In print design, it can be really awesome; In web design... not so much.

If you are still bothered by justified text, I just made a nice little bookmarklet that will help you out a bit. :) I hope you like it.

I love the way justified text can look in print, but until better typographic control is possible on the web I generally steer clear of it. A justified paragraph that's full of awkward spacing and distracting "rivers" is one of the quickest ways to make sure that I'm not going to read something.

I'm going to agree in that there is a very limited number of cases where justified text is applicable on the Web -- it just hardly looks right.

I like justified text online but only if there's enough whitespace, and good line spacing. I think column width also comes into play, as well as what sort of text is being represented.

If you have dense text, it can look just fine. If you have decent spacing between lines, you don't get lost. At least I don't.

But in most cases I do agree that left justified works best.

I do not like justified text on the web either, the only time that it comes clost to working imo is on long lines that are heavily leaded with semi small type. It is the only way to avoid huge rivers between the text. It typically also works better with serif faces becaue they fill the gaps slightly better...

Also long blocks of justified text are hard to read because they are like your eye hitting a brick wall at the end of the line. The abrupt stop is a harder transition to the next line than a rag is.