Breaking a paragraph up, and aligning it
A paragraph broken into lines, then laid out four ways: left, right, centred, justified.
Paragraphs, columns and typography
You supply the text; the library works out where each line ends, where each column stops and where each page breaks.
You give it a paragraph. It measures every word, decides where each line ends, and pours what is left onto the next line, the next column, the next page. Nobody counts characters and nobody guesses how much will fit.
It also settles the awkward cases a person would otherwise have to notice by hand: a word too long for its column, the places inside a word where it may be split, a pair of words that must not be parted across a line, a heading that has to shrink rather than run off the edge. Two entire novels are laid out this way, chapters and all.
What it saves you
- Text of unknown length still fits
- A description that runs to three lines on one order and eleven on the next needs no special case and no second look. The page absorbs it, and the rest of the document moves down politely.
- Nothing runs off the edge
- A word wider than the column it sits in is broken or shrunk to fit, where you said and how you said — never spilled over the margin.
- It reads like a book, not like a printout
- Justified paragraphs, indents, tab stops that line figures up on the decimal point, dotted lines leading to a page number, lists that hang under their own bullet.
See it done
Breaking an overlong word
A word longer than the column that holds it: the library leaves it whole, or cuts it at the column's edge.
Soft hyphens and no-break spaces
A justified column set twice: the long words breaking at their soft hyphens with a hyphen shown, or left whole, and a figure a no-break space keeps together.
Break points after a slash or a hyphen
A justified column set twice: file paths and compounds running past the edge with no break points, then wrapping where a break after a slash or a hyphen is allowed.
A report that lays itself out
A title, a rule, two paragraphs, a heading, a table of twenty-six rows and a footnote, handed over in reading order and broken across two pages by the engine.
A font behind the font
One line of statuses set twice: in a company font alone, where the characters it has no glyph for come out as empty boxes, then with a second font behind it that draws them.
What a font knows about its own letters
Four samples set twice each, once plain and once with a single setting activated: joined letters, small capitals, figures that hang below the line, and pairs moved closer together.
Text poured into columns
One long passage poured into three columns, each fitting the lines its height allows and handing the rest to the next.
Paragraph indents and spacing
The same two paragraphs six ways: as they come, a first line pushed in, a first line pulled out, the room above and below, a justified block whose last line is centred, and where the first and last lines sit in their rectangle.
A contents page with dot leaders
A contents page whose entries are led to their page numbers by dots the layout draws.
Changing style in the middle of a paragraph
A paragraph whose style changes inside it: size, underline, colour.
Tabs and tab stops
The same tabulated rows under each of the three methods, then a contents block whose dots run out to a stop on the right. A tabulation can step on from wherever the text stopped, land on the regular grid of a typewriter, or aim at a stop of its own, on which the text that follows starts, centres, or lines up by its decimal point.
Lists made from an indent and a tab stop
Bulleted, numbered and nested lists, each built out of an indent that hangs out to the left and one tab stop rather than out of a dedicated list object: the marker sits in the room the indent opens, and every line below the first begins where the tabulation put the text.
Stamps fitted to a rectangle
What a document says about itself — DRAFT, COPY, PAID — laid across rectangles of four different shapes and scaled to each.
Shrunk headings and a turned label
Headings of different lengths shrunk to share one column, and a label turned a quarter turn up the page's spine.
Badges of one size, names of every length
Eight badges cut to the same size, carrying names that run from two short words to a double-barrelled surname. The library finds, for each name, the largest size that fits its rectangle, and that size is printed underneath.
Words that follow a curve
A seal whose legend rides its ring and a second one bowed at its foot so those words stand upright, a title bent over an arch, and the same sentence begun at three places along one straight path.
A whole novel in English
A public-domain English novel read into its twelve chapters and laid out across sixty-two numbered pages, behind a contents you can click, each chapter opening a page of its own and the engine choosing every line break.
A whole novel in French
The same layout on a French text: thirty-seven chapters over a hundred and sixty-nine pages, drawing the accented alphabet, so the font kept inside the file carries every shape a wider alphabet needs.
Prices crossed out, a shadow behind the title
A half-price shelf card: every line shows the old price with a line through it beside the new one, the sum of the three carries a rule over the top, and the title is set a second time behind itself, shifted and paler, so it reads over anything.