Symmetric typesetting with LaTeX

On the first look the LaTeX ecosystem looks highly complex. There are an endless amount of packages, tutorials and guidelines available. The surprising fact is that it is possible to reduce the idea behind latex to a single screenshot. What the LaTeX community tries to achive is shown in the top of the image. The typset paragraph looks similar to a poem. The headline is formatted with centering and the paragraph is fully justified. The justification was created by adjusting the glue between the words, plus minor adjustments of the microtype package.

In contrast, the picture at the bottom shows what the TeX community tries to prevent. In such a situation the symmetry is missing because everything was formatted with flush left.

The interesting situation is that this preference has nothing to do with the LaTeX software but with typography in general. So we have to understand why formatting something by centering it is perceived as beautiful. The idea is that the written word follows the principle of art. It is not only a book but it is a graphical creation. Or to be more specific, the reader of the text should get the impression. From an authors perspective it is trivial to format something with the centering mode.

Let us take a closer look into the shown paragraph. It is the same text, the same font and the software for rendering it was in both cases the latest version of the lualatex engine. The only difference is that in the second case the formatting style “flush left” was applied. Now the question to answer is which of the cases has a higher score in terms of typographic quality? The simple answer is that the top example gets the quality judgement “beautiful example for typesetting”, while the bottom case gets the judgment “low quality or even no typographic quality at all”.

This judgment is not based on any objective criteria but it is simple a preference for or against flush left. How can it be that the established latex software including the high quality Latin Modern Roman Font can create low quality typesetting? Because the untold assumption is that only centering text which includes the headline and the paragraph is beautiful and everything else is wrong.

The underlying reason why this rule is valid is because it takes more effort to create full justified text. If the text isn't created with an algorithm but with a hot metal printing press it will take endless amount of time to fully justify the text. What the typesetter has to do is determine the size of the words and calculate how many glue is needed. In contrast, putting the letters for the bottom example together can be realized much faster.