10mo ago

TIL about the 'River' effect in typography

en.m.wikipedia.org River (typography) - Wikipedia

In typography, rivers (or rivers of white) are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. Rivers can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts. Rivers are less noticeable with proportional fonts, due to narrow spacing. Another cause of rivers is the close repetition of a long word or similar words at regular intervals, such as "maximization" with "minimization" or "optimization".

15 comments

Ok.
That’s one more 40 year old question I had, that I can now cross off my list.
- Had no idea this had a name. Very happy to find out that it does!

I've definitely noticed it, but had no Idea it had a name or that editors would take steps to avoid it. Kinda neat OP.

Learned about it from the comments of this post: https://lemmy.ca/post/19811769
- Cool! Thanks for crediting original thread!
- test reply

Now I want to have written a book that utilised this to set the scenery. Let's see the translators deal with that!
- House of Leaves uses a bunch of gimmicks like this... Kind of forget if he used "rivers" specifically, but I'd be kind of surprised if he hadn't.
- Let me take you back to punched card days, when people would design patterns and shapes using different characters, a single line at a time (one card, one line of 80 characters).
  When the cards were just printed (to a nice, noisy, dot-matrix), you'd see the image they designed.

Typographers/Designers pay attention to all sorts of minor text details that the average person just cannot be bothered to care about. Like, a reader might have a sense that something feels “off” on the page, but they probably won’t quite know what it is. Or, if they do notice it, they’ll just go, “Huh, that’s funny,” and move on. With everything going digital now though, and having variable page sizes and such, there’s a bit less control for things like that for web & mobile stuff. It’s only print people that probably have to worry about that now.
- The copywriters in my company stare at a landing page for hours and fix little word flow details.
  I remember having to explain responsive design, since words can break on screen size. The old editors who worked on magazines were kind of annoyed. But fortunately, we have better css tools like clamp, and word break to control word flow. But honestly its easier to teach the copywriter how tech works.
- Rivers caused by justified text are bad for those with dyslexia and present a website accessibility issue. Good developers avoid allowing users the option.
- The thing that normal people don't worry about is "readability." Bad type is harder to read, for example rivers are distracting. Turning black marks on paper into concept, metaphor, irony, narrative, setting should be as painless of a process as possible so that the most people possible have access to reading and information. Little details like letter and word spacing, font, typeface add up to something that is either easy or difficult to read.

I would always squint my eyes and try to see pictures in the 'rivers'

I see this reading book on my tablet! Had no idea there was a name for it. When I'm really tired it's distracting.

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