Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

So many books are going electronic! Here's a typesetting topic for those who still love print, too--paragraph justification and hyphenation. If you don't hyphenate, you get weird spaces. If you do, you get a paragraph of dashes. What level of hyphenation do you like in books?

I'm not sure what you mean. I've published a book on createspace and it's also on kindle. Are either of those places you've experienced the paragraph justification and hyphenation phenomena?

Victoria wrote: "I'm not sure what you mean. I've published a book on createspace and it's also on kindle. Are either of those places you've experienced the paragraph justification and hyphenation phenomena?"

I've done the same, Victoria. Mine is an eBook, but I was thrilled when my proof copy of the paperback arrived. The quality of the paper... the glossy cover that looks more like a hardback... and absolutely no problems with the print, and that was completely a DIY job.

Leah, could you explain a bit more? I can't visualise where hyphenating comes into this at all. Some words need to be hyphenated, but not that many.

justified print left for ebook

Simply put if you justify left with print without limiting hyphenations it can lead to a multitude of hyphens running down the right side of the print.

If you limit the number of consecutive hyphenations as well as fiddle with how close the words have to be to the right margin you can reduce both hyphenation and ragged right to a bearable level while avoiding the weird gaps often seen in pure justified text.

When typesetting a novel for print or online, type is generally justified. Within that some software offers many choices about how the words break between lines. You can choose no hyphenation so that a word is never broken between lines,
which can leave large spaces between words on a line:
"No hyphenation"

If you choose to allow hyphenation, you can select varying levels of where words are allowed to break (how many letters are on each side of the hyphen):

"I always hy-
phenate."
"I always hyphen-
ate."

That makes word spacing consistent but can slow readers down as they piece together words.

I see both in books and am curious what you like to read and use in your books. Which do you prefer?

I have designed books both ways based on author preferences. and was wondering if some sort of standard might emerge in the indie book market.

When typesetting a novel for print or online, type is generally justified. Within that some software offers many choices about how the words break between lines. You can choose no hyphenation so that a word is never broken between lines,
which can leave large spaces between words on a line:
"No hyphenation"

If you choose to allow hyphenation, you can select varying levels of where words are allowed to break (how many letters are on each side of the hyphen):

"I always hy-
phenate."
"I always hyphen-
ate."

That makes word spacing consistent but can slow readers down as they piece together words.

I see both in books and am curious what you like to read and use in your books. Which do you prefer?

I have designed books both ways based on author preferences. and was wondering if some sort of standard might emerge in the indie book market.

R.F.G. A creative thinker! Interesting solution! Is that how you lay out your books? What feedback do you get from reader's?

Leah wrote: "R.F.G. A creative thinker! Interesting solution! Is that how you lay out your books? What feedback do you get from reader's?"

I've done two that way, with a bit of a wave down the right margin. Since POD prints are more expensive and I don't really try to push sales I haven't sold a print yet.

The manuscript I'm currently working on is set for hyphenation with fully justified and so far it hasn't hyphenated anything, so I'm still looking for the best compromise between the settings.

One comment I did receive from someone experiencing attention deficit (who looked at a proof I have) was that some of the gaps from fully justified print made it harder for her to actually focus on a book as the differing spacings got too distracting.

She preferred the slightly ragged right and slightly wider line spacing as it made it easier for her to not keeping losing her place and reading the same paragraph(s) over and over until she gave up.

Everyo-
ne
That's how hyphenation is occurring in many books I've read lately. Is it an Indie-only phenomenon, since I only read Indie now? Maybe I slept through book hyphenation for dummies in Word Processing class, but this feels flat out wrong. I haven't checked my own book for this (I pray not) and it may be device specific, but it makes me want to cry.

I think I prefer the large white gap to what happens in the books I've read simply from a grammatical standpoint, not from a design and layout standpoint.

Melissa,

The person doing the layout can limit consecutive hyphenations anywhere from 0 to 100, so if an indie book has so many hyphens it's distracting it's either due to the person who wrote the book or the person who did the layout for print.

It's been awhile, and my memory isn't what it used to be but if I remember right, I clicked on 'do not hyphenate' when I did my prints. Instead, I checked what each line looked like and fixed the long weird spaces manually by adding additional spaces here and there until it looked natural, In extreme cases, it's easy to hyphenate the word anyways.

It may have been a little more work but I hate it when there are too many (like every other line when not every line) and like others said, when the words are strangely cut.

Showing an old dog can learn old tricks, users of Word older that 2013 can set the compatibility option to do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.X does.

Per the Wife (who normally dislikes the weird gaps found in so many Word docs that haven't been run through a professional grade typesetting program) the modified spacing is acceptable.

Since I use Word 97 I now get to try some revised typesetting such as it is, as I have no budget for software at present.

http://wordribbon.tips.net/T005984_Be...

R.F.G. wrote: "Melissa,

The person doing the layout can limit consecutive hyphenations anywhere from 0 to 100, so if an indie book has so many hyphens it's distracting it's either due to the person who wrote the..."

It's not the amount of hyphenation; it's the type of hyphenation I've been seeing that don't follow rules of breaking it up syllabically. Here are some examples.

Hyphena-
te

Or wa-
tch

Or determi-
ne