John Kane wrote:
It depends :) I think that there was some research in
the 1980s suggesting that ragged is easier to read.
I think, though, that it may depend on the width of
the paper. I was having the devil of a time reading a
research proposal my boss had handed me. It is
justified and takes up almost the entire page.
Margins are only about 1.4 cm left and right.
Out of frustration, I finally did a cut & paste from
Word to Lyx and set it in a two column format (APA)
which is easy to read albeit justified.
Justification alone does not guarantee readability.
Overly long lines is indeed one way of ruining things.
The rule of thumb is no more than 66 letters per line,
which is why LyX seems to be a bit wasteful on normal paper.
If you want to save paper, use columns or smaller paper.
But note that very small margins might look ugly even
if readability doesn't suffer.
I think the wider the text the more useful ragged is
since it serves as a cue to where the eyes are to move
left after reaching the end of the line of text.
Actually, you don't need ragged _right_ for this.
The eyes don't have to find anything on the right
side - you just follow the text. Your eyes need
to find the correct place on the left side though,
so ragged left could help a lot. Much more than
ragged right. But it is terminally ugly - the reason
why no document ever is printed right justified.
Centered is even better - but yuck.
Ragged right is also ugly - but people are more
used to it. Many word processors (msword included)
makes a too bad job of justification - that's why they
don't default to justified. Latex does this well
if the lines aren't too short.
I'd say - use justified unless you have a very clear
reason for not doing so. Ragged right has its place,
but I don't think matters of taste alone is enough
to warrant it. Extremely narrow columns might
be a reason, but even newspapers tend to justify...
Helge Hafting
