Akinori Ito wrote:
> (By the way, how do you think about FORMAT_NICE (word fill)
> option? Do you think it improves the appearance of a page?)
Frankly, I think it doesn't.
Okay, I guess that needs some further explanation. I'll try to
separate personal opinions from objective problems, but of course
this is to a certain degree simply a matter of individual taste.
Personally, I think block justification of texts with fixed width
characters actually decreases readability. Block justification
works nice in print where you have proportional width fonts and
hyphenation at the end of the line for long words. We don't have
these available for w3m. There is no fine adjustment for interword
spaces, it's either " " or " " or worse even " " and longer
runs. This is clunky and hard on the eye. Also, the effects can be
worse depending on the language. English has mostly short words,
but in German there are many longer words, and in agglutinating
languages like Finnish sentences often consist of only a few rather
long words. If you do a block fill, you will end up with long runs
of spaces separating the individual words.
The current implementation of FORMAT_NICE inserts additional spaces
from the left side. This is very obvious if you look at a large
block of filled text, where there all the large interword spaces
are at the left side of the text, and the words on the right side
are all bunched together. Ten years ago, the first word processing
program I used (1st Word on an Atari ST), inserted spaces from both
sides. The first one on the left, the second one the right, the
third one on the left, and so. This gives slightly better results,
in my opinion. A pseudo-random distribution might work even better.
Block filling doesn't work very well for narrow columns of text,
where there are only a few words per line. Many pages who (ab)use
TABLEs for layout purpose try to force newspaper-like columns. What
might just work well for the author's Netscape configuration with
a proportional font of a specific size, will often result in columns
that are too narrow for different font sizes. This concerns w3m,
too. I typically run w3m in a 96x32 xterm, which adds more space
to allow wider columns, but on 80-column displays the effect is
quite noticeable. Of course this is a problem with left-justified
text, too, but it the result is even uglier with block justification.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@unix-ag.uni-kl.de
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 19 2000 - 10:30:43 CDT