The latest issue of 8 Faces magazine (run by our creative director Elliot Jay Stocks) is now available to buy, and features an article by our engineer Bram Stein about hyphenation and justification on the web. Bram gets into the details of just what, exactly, makes line justification so tricky on the web.

Here’s a preview:

As screen resolutions increase to the point where it’s comfortable to read long-form text from a screen, more and more traditionally print-based publications are moving to the web. However, the quality of these two reading experiences is not quite the same, and this is partially because designers working on print publications have the benefit of advanced justification and hyphenation algorithms that are not available on the web. Ideally, using paragraph justification (or not) should be a design choice. This choice is made more complicated because of the short-sighted justification algorithms employed in web browsers.

We’re going to need better paragraph justification in browsers if we aim to make it a place for long-form reading.

The whole issue looks great, and we’re proud to have members of the Typekit team among its contributors. You can pick up a printed edition, a PDF edition, or both versions of the issue right now from the 8 Faces website.