This post is best viewed on a wide screen.
Introduction
Something I’ve come to like from a decent amount of time spent using LATEX and Groff is that text is justified by default. This means that spaces are widened so the lines of text are all the same width, creating a uniform right margin. This is the standard in books, and I think it looks rather nice. It certainly doesn’t seem to hurt readability, although I can’t say that it improves readability either. Overall, I think it gives the writing a look of professionalism, regardless of whether it deserves it.
Of course, justified text only really matters for larger paragraphs, which are decidedly less common on social media sites where short messages of at most a few sentences, with little or no formatting, are favoured. The next paragraph is left-aligned (the HTML default) to demonstrate how much less aesthetically pleasing it is.
Amet harum natus quo numquam explicabo? Maiores perferendis aut necessitatibus suscipit sint Accusantium totam ipsa commodi eveniet ullam ipsa Est obcaecati eos tenetur modi libero. Laborum obcaecati porro esse tenetur magni Vero nihil similique cum dignissimos autem minima Neque incidunt dignissimos rerum voluptas sed ab. Eligendi minima placeat ut assumenda!
Using It
Fortunately, justified text is easy to enable in a variety of text formatting applications.
LATEX and Groff
Justified text is the default. That’s for a reason.
HTML + CSS
Apply the text-align: justify style to any tag which will contain
paragraphs of text (so probably <p>).
Word Processors
The menu option is usually simple enough to locate, and the key binding in Libre Office and Microsoft Office is Ctrl + J.
Emacs
While some aggressive auto-justification mode probably exists, the
current paragraph may be justified by running fill-paragraph with a
prefix argument: C-1 M-q. This can be nice for slightly longer
paragraphs in Org documents.
Downsides
Text justification algorithms break down when lines are very narrow.
This matters most for web content, which may have to be displayed in a
narrow format, for example, on a phone screen. On this site, I keep the
formatting simple, so a paragraph will usually be the only thing in its
horizontal space. I also disable exceptions to this (notably
float:right content) for narrower screens, using an @media query in
my style sheet.
Text will also fill the space available, which may make the content feel cramped in some cases, since there will be less space between the paragraph and anything to its right.
Conclusion
I just think it’s neat!