By Marko Dugonjić CHAPTER 9CSS3 Text Module Level 3 Working Draft^69 proposes the new spacing-limit
value type, which represents optimum, minimum, and maximum spacing
in word-spacing and letter-spacing. The syntax in this case would be:
p {
text-align: justify;
word-spacing: 0 -0.05em 1em;
letter-spacing: 0 -0.01em 0.02em;
}
/ optimum, minimum, maximum respectively /
Another problem with hyphenation is the lack of fine-grained control over
the severity and occurrence of hyphenation. It’s considered a type crime
when more than three successive rows are hyphenated. Additionally,
Robert Bringhurst, the author of The Elements of Typographic Style^70 suggests
that at least three characters of the hyphenated word should be taken to
the next line.
CSS3 Paged Media Working Draft^71 proposed a few interesting proper-
ties (there are more, but I’ve found these to be the most important):
- hyphenate-before specifies a minimum number of characters in a
word before the hyphenation character - hyphenate-after specifies a minimum number of characters in a
word after the hyphenation character - hyphenate-lines specifies a maximum number of successive hy-
phenated lines in an element
If these were supported by browsers, the subsequent set of CSS rules
would look like this:
69 http://smashed.by/spacing
70 http://smashed.by/bringhurst
71 http://smashed.by/hyphen