From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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09 Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text

09 Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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09 Favor flush-left, ragged-right body text

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- [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…

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