Full vs. Left Justification

The reason book publishers and newspapers (and all good lawyers) use full justification instead of left justification is to pack more characters in the same amount of space.

See http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typelayout/a/justifyleft.htm which explains as follows:


About Fully-Justified Text

• Often considered more formal, less friendly than left-aligned text.
• Usually allows for more characters per line, packing more into the same amount of space (than the same text set left-aligned).
• May require extra attention to word and character spacing and hyphenation to avoid unsightly rivers of white space running through the text.
• May be more familiar to readers in some types of publications, such as books and newspapers.
• Some people are naturally drawn to the "neatness" of text that lines up perfectly on the left and right.

Traditionally many books, newsletters, and newspapers use full-justification as a means of packing as much information onto the page as possible to cut down on the number of pages needed. While the alignment was chosen out of necessity, it has become so familiar to us that those same types of publications set in left-aligned text would look odd, even unpleasant.