Word and Illustrator have a "justify text" feature that neatly aligns both the left and right edges of long passages of text. It's a very handy feature, since a single button tidies everything up. Assuming websites could naturally do the same, I looked into it and found "justify" among the "text-align" options that control text alignment—left, center and right! I implemented it right away, and sure enough, long passages that hadn't been aligned neatly on the right were now perfectly aligned! Just as I was thinking I should have implemented it much sooner, a client told me, "It isn't aligned." Huh?? I normally use Chrome, but it seems that even now, in IE, "text-align:justify;" alone won't align the text neatly.
In IE only, the right edge of the text isn't vertically aligned
Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us.
So we add another declaration in the same place. Adding "text-justify:inter-ideograph;" apparently lets IE and Edge align the right edge as well. It seemed to work fine for full-width characters like Japanese, as well as for Chinese and Hangul. Looking into text-justify, it turns out to be CSS that adjusts line-edge alignment according to the language.
Implemented with "text-justify:inter-ideograph;"
Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us. Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us.
All right! Now everything will line up neatly… or so I'd like to say, but this "text-justify" specification has not yet become an official W3C specification. So even if you implement it now, there's a chance it won't work (won't be applied) in the future.
Also, with this code, the spacing between half-width English characters can become too wide and hard to read. (Because the declaration assumes full-width text like Japanese.)
Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Vestibulum tortor quam, feugiat vitae, ultricies eget, tempor sit amet, ante. Donec eu libero sit amet quam egestas semper. Aenean ultricies mi vitae est. Mauris placerat eleifend leo.
Merci, a website production company in Hamamatsu and Kakegawa, supports your company in a wide range of areas, from print advertising to the internet. Please feel free to consult with us.
We could also implement this tag in the blogs our clients write themselves, but we'd have to make sure they understand the risks: "the layout may break when half-width alphabetic characters are included" and "the layout may break in the future due to browser version upgrades," and so on.
I was terrible at English back in my school days, so when I first started working in website production I used to think, "I wish the code and tags were in Japanese…" But now I find myself battling the trickiness of Japanese instead. I want text to be easy to read and look beautiful! On the internet, Japanese—with its mix of full-width and half-width characters and its jumble of hiragana, katakana and kanji—seems to be a very delicate language.
