No Alignment Left Behind

I find it curious that left alignment is the default setting on many applications even now that computer logic has been able to justify text very easily. Many years ago it was understandable if a low powered terminal received a series of words from a telegram and worked out where to start the next line by counting how many spaces the line had left, and how long the word was. If there was limited memory in the device it had to get the words out as new ones were coming in.

I wondered how typewriters handles that too, did the typist have to get used to manually judging how many characters they had left in a line, and if the word could fit onto it? If not, do you hyphenate the word or not? I guess in some circumstances hyphenation would be acceptable, while in others it wouldn't. Remember typewriters put each letter onto the page as it was typed, so errors in that judgement meant a rewrite of the entire page. I guess that would teach you to judge it better.

Since computers have had some form of memory to work with the message, and some logic to work out whether or not to start the word on the next line and space out the line above, or start on the next line and keep the spacing of the line above, or hyphenate the word etc it seems like a throwback to the past to continue to use left alignment in documents, yet it's the norm and I can't figure out why. Justifying looks far neater in my opinion. In almost every project I do, I always justify the main text. I can only think of three possible reasons why "justify" is not the default nowadays.

1. Some interpretations spread out the last line which looks terrible.
2. Visually it's easier to track the peaks at the ends of sentences.
3. People are just so used to left aligned blocks of text that they don't notice.

Many novels use justified blocks of text, although I have seen a few using a left alignment. Novels by their very design are intended to be read in great chunks, with the reader often staying for a chapter or more in a session, so if justified text was a hindrance surely novel publishers would have figured that out decades ago. Both left and right alignment have their uses, the point is about the default settings on text editing and displaying applications. Note that both the right and left edges of the block of text are neat instead of just the left edge. The text itself looks evenly spaced too, which is not always the case, depending on the line and it's space limits. Now tell me this doesn't look neater and more professional? Novels also have a convention of the first line indent too, which also adds to the feel.

Readability is not decided by the alignment of the text block, but also the choice of font face and size, the contrast between the text and background colour, and the line spacing (the space between each line of text). If lines of text are too close to each other ie the tops of the characters in the second line are close to touching the bottoms of the characters in the first line, they become hard to read. Try playing about with a block of text in Open Office by changing the line spacing, to see the difference it can make. So as much as text alignment is not much of a factor in readability, it is in the aesthetics of the block.

As I write this, I see the output of the text is going to fit into a space around 600px wide. On some devices the screen won't get that wide, so when it shrinks it, the text is re-aligned to suit the new space it has to work with, so if you're seeing this on a screen 300px wide the lines will break at around the halfway mark of what I see. While it alters how many lines of text you see, the alignment itself shouldn't change. It will go through the exact same process as it does on my screen.

So many things we have today on computers have long been obsolete but we still have them because we feel we need them somehow, from floppy drives and serial ports to screensavers. I've come to the conclusion that the left align default is just another one to add to the list of legacies that we still have.

On a fun final note, I wonder how many political right wing publications feel they're sending a mixed message if they use a left alignment in their text? Do they feel like they've had to concede some minor aesthetic point to their opponents or have they been to blinded by their own hatred of anything that's not them to notice? If they right aligned it would people accept it? In the west we're used to reading left-to-right, which looks odd as right aligned. The opposite is also true in languages designed to be read right-to-left.