Another weblog

7 August 2009

Often, when you read a website, the page has one of two problems: either the text is too wide or the text is too narrow.

Typographers generally set single-column text with between sixty and seventy characters on a line. Since English never uses boustrophedon, when text goes above seventy characters per line, the reader’s eyes have a harder time finding the correct place when going back to the left side of the page. Double-column text is usually set with fewer characters per line—between forty and fifty—but then that causes the other problem.

When the line width is too small, gaping holes appear in the type. When the text is justified (which is good style), these gaps appear between the words on the line; when the text is aligned left (ragged right), the gaps are put together into the right margin.

In books this problem is normally solved using hyphenation. This is more difficult to implement on the Web, because (X)HTML and CSS standards don’t yet define rules for hyphenation.

This can be remedied by using a client-side script. If you would like to view any webpage with hyphenation, add the following code to your bookmark toolbar:

javascript:if(document.createElement){void(head=d
ocument.getElementsByTagName('head').item(0));voi
d(script=document.createElement('script'));void(s
cript.src='http://hyphenator.googlecode.com/svn/t
runk/Hyphenator.js?bm=true');void(script.type='te
xt/javascript');void(head.appendChild(script));}

Then all you need to do is click on the bookmark to hyphenate a page. But because web pages often fail to define the language they are using, an error message usually pops up.

By using a similar script as a WordPress plugin, I can implement this feature automatically on my blog for all viewers. However, I need to mark each paragraph with the class ‘hyphenate’, unless I want that warning message to pop up at my readers all the time

Posted in Technology, Typography |