Hi, On Fri, 27 Feb 2026 at 15:03, Taco Hoekwater <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > On 27 Feb 2026, at 12:24, Henning Hraban Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Am 27.02.26 um 11:09 schrieb Mikael Sundqvist: > >> Hi all, > >> Hans and I are exploring some new alignment features, in particular > >> ragged right. One of the problems is to get a "nice rag". Attached is > >> a sample with three different settings for various hsizes. The quote > >> comes from a Twain book, and is in German, since that might be more > >> challenging. > >> So, please, which one, if any, look in general better, and, more > >> importantly, why? > >> The prize you might get is a new keyword to align. > > > > Thank you for looking into this. Very nice choice of text! > > > > Good “Flattersatz” (ragged setting) in opposite to “Rauhsatz” (unjustified > > setting) should avoid hyphenation and should have a good rhythm, i.e. > > alternation of longer and shorter lines, the “Flatterzone” (ragged width, > > underfull tolerance) can be quite big. > > > > Under these criteria, none of the samples is good, all have too many > > hyphenations, and in “bad” places (not only at composite word boundaries). > > While the hyphenation differs, none of the examples avoids “bad” > > hyphenations. > > All have rivers with the quotation marks. > > The short lines could be even shorter, otherwise the rhythm of all three > > examples is acceptable. I miss protrusion. > > > > I can’t decide which example I like best – all three have their “moments” > > in some areas. > > What Hraban said ;)
Thanks for your thoughts! > > My additional two cents: > > 1st cent: In my opinion the first and last full lines would ideally be > shorter than the second and penultimate line. This is the rule for ragged > right titles and should work equally well for full paragraphs. Like XXX XX XXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXX ? > 2nd cent: With ragged typesetting, a hyphenation on the final full line > should be forbidden(“Pla-\break ckerei” is exceptionally bad) We did not alter the hyphenation setup, but indeed higher penalties here would make sense. \setupalign[lesshyphenation] did a pretty good job. > 3rd cent (bonus): If there is this much text, it would be not be hard to make > sure the last (partial) line is at least two long or three short words long. That is also not set up in the examples. But \setupalign[lessorphans] did a good job. Again, thanks. Let me next broaden the request a bit: Can you point to (pdf) examples where ragged right looks a) very good and b) not good? It gets a bit more concrete when looking at examples. /Mikael ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : [email protected] / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
