Product Code Database
In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range is the setting of typography flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell, or tabulation (and often to an image above it or under it).
The type alignment setting is sometimes referred to as text alignment, text justification, or type justification. The edge of a page or column is known as a margin, and a gap between columns is known as a gutter.
Some modern typesetting programs use the word justify more broadly and label these four options as: left justify, right justify, center justify and full justify. In programs that do not offer multiple kinds of justification, typically only left (for left-to-right languages) or right (for right-to-left languages) justification is provided.
The phrase "left alignment" is often used when the left side of text is aligned along a visible or invisible vertical line which may or may not coincide with the left margin. For example, if a paragraph that is flush left were indented from the left, it would no longer be flush left, but it would still be left aligned.
The term "right alignment" is frequently used when the right side of text is aligned along a visible or invisible vertical line which may or may not coincide with the right margin. For example, if a paragraph that is flush right were indented from the right, it would no longer be flush right, but it would still be right aligned.
When using justification, it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph separately by simply left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. As opposed to this, "" keeps the last line justified, no matter its length. Some modern typesetting programs (e.g. inDesign) have specific options to align the last line of a paragraph (either to the left, the right, or even to the center).
Centered text can also be commonly found on signs, flyers, and similar documents where grabbing the attention of the reader is the main focus, or visual appearance is important and the overall amount of centered text is small.
Thy father was delighted and cried out to the servant, 'Give him a hundred and three gold pieces with a robe of honour!' The man obeyed his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment, when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me; nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and praised by all present. When the blood-letting was over I had no power to keep silence and asked him, 'By God, O my lord, what made thee say to the servant, Give him an hundred and three dinars?'; and he answered, 'One dinar was for the astrological observation, another for thy pleasant conversation, the third for the phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred and the dress were for thy verses in my commendation.'" "May God show small mercy to my father," exclaimed I, "for knowing the like of thee."Richard Francis Burton, Tale of the Tailor, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights Thy father was delighted and cried out to the servant, 'Give him a hundred and three gold pieces with a robe of honour!' The man obeyed his orders, and I awaited an auspicious moment, when I blooded him; and he did not baulk me; nay he thanked me and I was also thanked and praised by all present. When the blood-letting was over I had no power to keep silence and asked him, 'By God, O my lord, what made thee say to the servant, Give him an hundred and three dinars?'; and he answered, 'One dinar was for the astrological observation, another for thy pleasant conversation, the third for the phlebotomisation, and the remaining hundred and the dress were for thy verses in my commendation.'" "May God show small mercy to my father," exclaimed I, "for knowing the like of thee."
Another example: when the spaces between words line up approximately above one another in several loose lines, a distracting river of white space may appear. Discussion of rivers and methods of avoiding them Rivers appear in right-aligned, left-aligned and centered settings too, but are more likely to appear in justified text, because of the additional word spacing. Since there is no added white space built into a typical full stop (period), other than that above the full stop itself, full stops contribute to the river effect in a limited way.
At one time, common word-processing software adjusted only the spacing between words, which was a source of the river problem. Modern word processing packages and professional publishing software significantly reduce the river effect by adjusting also the spacing between characters. Additionally, these systems use advanced digital typography techniques such as automatically choosing among different glyphs for the same character and slightly stretching or shrinking the character in order to better fill the line. The technique of glyph scaling or micro-typography has been implemented by Adobe InDesign and more recent versions of pdfTeX.
The problem of loose lines is reduced by using . With older typesetting systems and WYSIWYG word processors, this was done manually: the compositor or author added hyphenation on a case-by-case basis. Currently, most typesetting systems (also called layout programs) and modern word processors hyphenate automatically, using a hyphenation algorithm. In addition, professional typesetting programs almost always provide for the use of an exception dictionary, in part because no algorithm hyphenates all words correctly, and in part because different publishers will follow different dictionaries. Different publishers may also have different rules about permissible hyphenation. Most publishers follow a basic system such as the Chicago Manual of Style or Oxford style, but will overlay their own "house style", which further restricts permissible hyphenation.
The Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems have historically used Han ideographs, which do not allow for justification, since characters were fitted into a square grid. With the continous adoption of European-inspired punctuation, numerals justification has become a more flexible question in these scripts. Chinese and Japanese texts do not use word spaces, therefore justification focuses on adjusting spaces around punctuation, boundaries and inter-character spacing. Korean adopted the use of word spaces.
Its use has waned somewhat only since the early 20th century through the advocacy of the typographer Jan Tschichold's book Asymmetric Typography and the freer typographic treatment of the Bauhaus, Dada, and Russian constructivist movements.
Not all "flush left" settings in traditional typography were identical. In flush left text, words are separated on a line by the default word space built into the font.
Continuous casting typesetting systems such as the Linotype machine were able to reduce the jaggedness of the right-hand sides of adjacent lines of flush left composition by inserting self-adjusting space bands between words to evenly distribute white space, taking excessive space that would have occurred at the end of the line and redistributing it between words. This feature is also available in desktop publishing systems, although most now default to more sophisticated approaches.
Graphic designers and typesetters using desktop systems also have the option to adjust word and letter spacing, or "tracking", on a manual line-by-line basis to achieve more even overall spacing. Some modern desktop publishing programs, such as Adobe InDesign, evaluate the effects of all the different possible line-break choices on the entire paragraph, to choose the one that creates the least variance from the ideal spacing while justifying the lines (so as to reduce rivers); this also gives the least uneven edge when set with a ragged margin.
|
|
