Justified text is when the spaces between the words in a line of text are made wider so that the line is the same length as all of the others in the paragraph.
For a given font, every letter has a certain width, and a space has a certain width. If letters are stacked up into words, and words are stacked up to make a line of text, because of the different sizes of the letters, and the different lengths of the words, the words in the line may not reach the very edge of the space for the paragraph. Some lines may get closer to the full width of the paragraph than others.
If all of the left sides of the lines of text in the paragraph are aligned, then the result will be that the right sides don’t line up, and the text will look ‘ragged’. (This type of layout is sometimes called ‘ragged-right‘ for this reason.)
This often doesn’t look very good – particularly in printed form. A solution is to make the spaces between the words slightly larger on the lines that don’t quite fit the full width of the paragraph. This increase in spacing is often not too noticeable, so it makes the overall look of the paragraph better without looking uneven. This is called justified text.
Justified text is almost always used in print books – especially novels and other fiction works. Left-aligned (or ‘ragged-right’) text should generally never be used in such books.
The Final Line
Very often, the last line of a paragraph contains fewer words than the rest – that’s just where the last sentence happened to end. In this case, spreading out the words across the entire line would look a bit odd, so the final line tends not to be justified – spaces of the normal size are used, and the line is aligned to the left edge of the paragraph.
This technically means that there are three types of justification – left-justified, centre-justified, and right-justified – with the left, centre, and right just referring to whether the last line is left, centre, or right aligned. However, since centre-justified and right-justified are almost never used, you will rarely see these mentioned or named.
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