Amazon may be one but do you know what a river is?

Amazon may be one but do you know what a river is?

I recently discussed the trouble eBook readers have controlling widows and orphans. Well, not so much trouble really as they just can’t.

With my love of typography combined with my fear of the craft being lost for ever, due to the ever increasing popularity of the eBook, I thought it might be fun to look at some of the more obscure typographical controls that exist to ensure the best possible experience for the reader. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against eBook technology, in fact I love it. It’s just that it has taken 600 years and the combined effort of thousands of individuals to develop typography as we see it today. The eBook has convenience and portability and a printed book has character and elegance. If printed books are to survive, and I believe they will, the benefits and history of printing need to be explained and promoted.

Widows and orphans have been dealt with, so let’s have a chat about rivers! What is a river? Well a river usually occurs in justified text, which is where each line of type is set to the same measure to give the page a blocked appearance (most fiction and non fiction books are typeset using justified text). To achieve an equal line measure requires extra or less space to be inserted between each word, or in extreme cases between each letter. The resulting uneven spacing can sometimes create a series of vertically aligned white spaces creating a division in the text, this white unbroken meandering white line looks something like a river, hence the name.

It probably sounds fairly insignificant however it is visually irritating and, more importantly, it causes the eye to subconsciously wander from the line being read and to follow the river instead. As an author you certainly want your words to be understood and retained; the role of a typesetter is to ensure that there are no distractions from this.

There are a number of tricks to erase the problem but unfortunately it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ wizardry and therefore a trade secret.

I think I might talk about colour next.