Typographic alignment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In typesetting, alignment is the horizontal positioning and alignment of text or images within a line, typically relative to a column.
There are four basic typographic alignments:
- flush left (= "flush left, ragged right")
- flush right (= "flush right, ragged left")
- justified
- centered
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[edit] Flush left
In English and most European languages where words are read left-to-right, text is often aligned "flush left," meaning that the text of a paragraph is aligned on the left-hand side with the right-hand side ragged. This is the default style of text alignment on the World Wide Web. Flush left is often the easiest to read option for aligning long line lengths, such as novels or other texts that don't divide the page into columns.
- "Quotations are often indented."
[edit] Flush right
In other languages that read text right-to-left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, text is commonly aligned "flush right". Additionally, flush-right alignment is used to set off special text in English, such as attributions to authors of quotes printed in books and magazines, and is often used when formatting tables of data.
[edit] Justified
A common type of text alignment in print media is "justification", where the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyphs or letters, are stretched or compressed to make the align both the left and right ends of each line of text. When using justification it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph separately by simply left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.
[edit] Centered
Text can also be "centered," or symmetrically aligned along an axis in the middle of a column. This is often used for the title of a work, and for poems and songs. As with flush-right alignment, centered text is often used to present data in tables. Centered text is considered less readable for a body of text made up of multiple lines because the ragged starting edges make it difficult for the reader to track from one line to the next.
[edit] Confusion over terminology
The terms justification and alignment are confused by the nomenclature of Microsoft Word which places 'left', 'right', 'full' and 'centered' as choices for the menu item 'justification'.
[edit] Tables
Another type of alignment sometimes used in tables is the alignment on a specified character, usually a decimal point.
375.87
23.678
389.3
