What's with all these damn spaces?

Justification.

Why, I have no idea.

That’s always bothered me, too.

I have no idea, but if you read just the areas you highlighted it turns to a pretty comical theme. :)

Yah, justification, it works badly with narrow columns.

Historically, newspapers use full justification as a means of packing as much information onto the page as possible.

It’s called “full justification” and the idea is to have the first letter start at the left margin and the last letter in the line end at the right margin. It looks better than having a ragged edge.

so everything starts at the same point on the line and ends at the same point. and sometimes words are too long or whatever to be on the same line so a shorter line has to be made longer.

Doesn’t full justification usually evenly space out the characters on each line? Check out “h i s [tons of spaces] e v e r – diminishing” on the linked article. So odd.

I assume that back then, before computers were used, full justification was more difficult to do, so that’s why it looks extra wonky.

Check out “h i s [tons of spaces] e v e r – diminishing” on the linked article. So odd.
The problem is the narrow column. If you have only three words, it’s gonna look bad.

I assume that back then, before computers were used, full justification was more difficult to do
Actually it was handled really with with Linotype machines.

My parents were newspaper people, when I was a kid (early 1970s) I loved to watch the Linotype operators. When you and I type, we see words on a screen. Their typing was instantly cast into printing molds from molten lead!! Insane!! It was fascinating!

I still have a hard time believing someone sat down and dreamt up a machine to do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine

Thank you all for sharing your knowledge!
I now know the name of which to add to my pet peeve list, “justification”.

I keep reading this question “What’s with all these damn species?”

Justfied columns are the standard for newspapers and many other print media. Some justification is done by word spacing and some by letter spacing. Letter spacing usually looks worse than word spacing.

When a column is really narrow, you don’t have much leeway to work with. Look at the line following each of those and you will see a word that’s too long to squeeze in above and that can’t be broken somewhere else. With a wider column, you can usually fudge something by a little squeezing or spreading and make it look better. If this were a book or a magazine and not a throwaway daily newspaper, the editor might fuss with it more. If I were the editor, I might even reword something in the text to make it break differently.

@Rarebear As do I.

And if @Jeruba were Queen, I’d be her court jester.

* sigh *

Justification is a lot better than the alternative.

I believe it’s all about justification. I often see that kind of things in newspapers.

Newspapers usually use justification when there are several articles on a page.

That way, it’s easier to visually distinguish a column from the one next to it, because their lines won’t be intruding into each others vertical spaces.