justified type + tracking rivers
Out of context: Reply #2
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- comicsans0
Caveat, I do not know about current the newspaper/magazine industry, I suspect they have effective software based on Donald Knuth's work but that it is very expensive.
This is a very difficult problem to automate. Experienced typesetters do it by eye and take a whole paragraph - or even page - view. The simplistic "line stuffing" approach used by most software will only do a good job by accident. Unless you take a whole paragraph approach (e.g. be prepared to add space on one line if it reduces, or evens out, spacing elsewhere) then strategic use of hypenation helps, a lot. Avoiding long paragraphs and long words helps too.
Note also that manual typesetters can do their job because the text is fixed, change the text and the justification decisions change also. Note also that most people are so used to crappy software justification that providing you avoid the more obvious rivers then people will just not notice.
If you want to do a *good* job the best approach is don't justify on a computer unless you have software specifically designed for the purpose, but if you had that you wouldn't ask the question.
If you must justify text on a computer then use short paragraphs and short words and set the wording in stone then be prepared to spend hours fiddling with discretionary hyphens and inter-word spacing to get, at best, a poor result which a manual typesetter would sneer at.
This is long, sorry I must be bored.