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Run Ragged

14 Comments

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Jon Tan

Great stuff, Mark, and thanks for the mention! I’d like to suggest that the numeric entity for a non break space ( ) is used if the markup needs to be parsed into XML/RSS/ATOM because nbsp doesn’t exist in XML as far as I remember.

Martin Pitt

Speaking as a dyslexic, I strongly disagree with the prepositions rule.

Whenever I am forced to break a line I always try to break after prepositions whenever possible as it is then easier to flow line-to-line. This is especially noticeable in large paragraphs.

Otherwise I often and almost always find myself backing up and trying to re-read the previous line to understand how a sentence relates to the next line due to not having been primed to do so. With a preposition I can mentally anticipate the connection and therefore read it fluently.

Ray Murray

I tried Ragadjust on my site and blog. On the site, all was fine, while on the blog (a Blogger issue perhaps), all of those prepositions were deleted from my entries! I had to resort to a forked version which has the preposition facility removed. Otherwise a very good tool.

Ben Barber

I’m glad you mentioned hyphens, though they probably need an entire post to cover them adequately. I experimented with @hyphens:auto@, but it hyphenated too aggressively and made the content challenging to read.

If I was to do it again, I think I’d set @hyphens:manual@ and then take an approach similar to Ragadjust — add @­@ to select words as necessary.

Adam Havel

An excellent article. But I agree with Josiah, this kind of processing probably shouldn’t be done during a document load. I’ve tried to make a grunt task based on the script by Nathan Ford and even though it’s not that universal, it is I believe a little more robust and much more configurable. Try it and tell me what you think.

Anatol Broder

I use similar rules for writing prose in Russian and German for years. In these languages words can be very long. An important addition is the usage of handcrafted @­@. Please don’t use the CSS automation for hyphenation. It’s not reliable.

For those who write in Markdown, I recommend to use the middle dot (·) for setting @ @ and the tilde (~) or the obulus (÷) for @­@. The replacement should happen in the post-markdown process. Redcarpet may be the first Markdown renderer with native support for this feature.

Mark, I’m curious, why don’t you use the rules in your own website?

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Adam Havel

As Josiah noted I would rather do this server-side. I created a grunt task just for that, based on the Nathan Ford’s plugin. It’s a little bit more robust and configurable than the original solution, but obviously a lot less universal.

Josiah Sprague

Very interesting and simple solution. I do think there is a lot of value in getting typography right, but I wonder if having the browser handle it via JavaScript has marginal gains for typography, at the price of some speed, usability or other front-end concerns. Why not have a script that handles this within the CMS or on the server, since it only needs to happen once, and not every time the page is rendered.

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