Ben Schmidt wrote: >> "Justify" means to insert variable-width spacing throughOUt >> the entire line so the left and right margins are aligned. >> That's how most books and newspaper articles appear. > > And 'right justify' sometimes means this too, as it seems it > does in the Vim docs, even though it doesn't really make > sense (unless it's perhaps the opposite of 'wrong justify' > which is a nice oxymoron even though grammatically flawed). > (Actually, I think there some left-alignment assumption made > in this case.) > > In other cases, 'right justify' is used to mean 'right > align,' similarly 'left justify' to mean 'left align.' With > this usage 'justify' simply means to 'make correct/straight' > which is its earlier/more original meaning.
I realise you're just remarking on the peculiarities of language, but nostalgia forces me to respond (I was quite close to typesetting systems a very long time ago). We always said "justify" to mean flush left and flush right. My recollection is that people started saying "right justify" when they wanted to clarify what "justify" meant (to an author, you might say "right justify", but to someone in the industry, you would say "justify"). The terms "left align" and "right align" are often used as alternatives to "flush left" and "flush right", but where I was, "align" referred to blocks like tables, diagrams, or a block of text. Text itself was flush left, or flush right, or justified, or centered. My personal view is that "left justify" was a term invented after the fact: since there was a "right justify", there had to be a "left justify". But in fact, "right justify" was itself invented, to soften the jargon. John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
