- [Voiceover] Law 9: Favor flush left,
ragged right body text.
Text alignment is one of the choices that you're going
to need to make when you're formatting body text.
Because body text makes up the bulk of
multi-page documents, the type of alignment you
choose has a big effect on the document as a whole.
The most common alignments used for
body text are flush left and justified.
This is flush left, ragged right text.
In flush left text, you can see
that the left edge of the text forms a
straight line and the right edge is ragged.
This means that the right edge is allowed to be uneven.
The shape of the right edge of this text block
is determined by where the words end
and the lines naturally break.
Now this is justified text.
Justified text is text that has both
flush left and flush right edges.
You can see in this block of text,
the left edge forms a straight line
and the right edge also forms a straight line.
So when text is set justified, in order to force
the right edge to form a straight line, the software
is going to add extra space between words.
Depending on the software you're using,
justifying text can cause large
gaps of white space between words.
When these horizontal gaps between the words
are actually larger than the vertical gaps
between the lines of text, the horizontal
gaps will visually merge together.
And they're going to appear to flow through
your paragraphs or your blocks of text.
When that happens, these horizontal gaps have formed rivers.
Rivers call a lot of attention to themselves,
and they pull attention away from the text
in your document, and that's always a bad thing.
You want readers to focus on the content
in a document, not on distractions
caused by design decisions.
Shorter line lengths are going to
cause larger, more frequent rivers.
So if you must justify body text,
you need to make sure that your line length
is long enough to minimize rivers.
A line length of 3 alphabets or
78 characters is a good place to start.
The best solution is to use flush left,
ragged right alignment for body text.
Flush left text is a more natural, modern
convention, and it will make your documents
look more modern and less rigid.
In flush left alignments, all words
have equal space between them,
and so rivers are not a problem.
Let's look at some other text alignments
and talk about why you might use them.
This is flush right, ragged left text.
In flush right text, you can see that
the right edge of the text forms a
straight line and the left edge is ragged.
In documents, you'll see flush right alignment
used to format elements like figure captions,
author attributions, quotes, maybe tabular data.
Languages that are read right to left,
like Arabic and Hebrew, are set flush right.
Flush right alignments are also used in
single page documents like posters,
invitations, maybe business cards,
to group elements and add some visual
excitement or interest to the page.
Another alignment option is centered text.
When text is horizontally centered,
there's a strong center axis and both
the right and left edges are ragged.
Center text is often used for document titles,
formal invitations, and other documents where
a more stable, conservative mood is desired.
Let's summarize.
Flush left, ragged right is the best choice
for body text alignment.
Flush left text eliminates rivers and
make your documents look more modern.
That's Law 9: favor flush left, ragged right body text.