070: Thou shall avoid creating “rivers” in justified text

Commentary When a text is justified, a distracting visual oddity can often occur whereby the spaces between words arrange themselves on top of one another, forming a curving white line running vertically through the paragraph—something referred to as a “river.” This can appear in flush-left, -right, and centered type but, because of the way justified type increases the word spacing by forcing the line of type to the full measure, the chance of rivers occurring increases. Rectifying the problem is straightforward. The first step is to introduce hyphenation into the setting; this can be done manually if you wish to reduce the number of hyphens that appear, or it can be set up automatically in your DTP software. Alternatively, you can track some of the....PD