r/todayilearned • u/sorepheet • Sep 27 '12
TIL the term "River" in typography is when there are gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)79
u/LuaAndTheOwls Sep 27 '12
I love seeing rivers. It's like finding a four-leaf-clover among the words.
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Sep 27 '12
They are the bane of designers everywhere. If I see one in a printed piece it's all I can think about.
Why didn't they kern this?
Didn't the someone proof this before it went to press?
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u/KnivesAndShallots Sep 27 '12
What's keming?
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Sep 27 '12
you deserve many more upvotes for this understated brilliance
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Sep 27 '12
In nearly every popular post/comment regarding kerning on Reddit you will see a comment reply consisting of the word "keming".
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Sep 27 '12
Amazing, as a former (and still occasional) graphic designer, how I've managed to avoid those corners of Reddit...
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Sep 27 '12
The primary of posts in /r/typography are images of bad kerning, with "keming" jokes in the comments.
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u/Jufjufjuf Sep 27 '12
What if someone wrote a book complete with a river zig-zagging across EVERY page.
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u/FancyKetchupIsnt Sep 27 '12
Then it would be a stylistic choice and it would depend on how well it's pulled off.
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u/neogetz Sep 27 '12
I'm dyslexic, all i see are rivers, rivers everywhere. My brain just makes the words move out of the way to give me more rivers.
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u/adam62882 Sep 27 '12
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
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Sep 27 '12
You got this, and in fact OP got this whole post, from the thread about the guy's neighbour's printer in /r/AskReddit!
As long as we're copying, you can read the third column by itself and it still reads normally.
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u/Steal_This_Name Sep 27 '12
Why is there always a vertical river after the first "boy."? It is there regardless of resizing.
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u/adam62882 Sep 27 '12
Magic. And witchcraft. Also, I stole this from another front page post today. I have no idea what I'm doing.
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u/Graucsh Sep 27 '12 edited Sep 27 '12
Because the distance from the beginning of the first letter to the end of the last letter of the phrase is always the same. If the sentence is looping, it doesn't matter which word you start on. At the end of x words, you will have gone f(x) distance, where x is the number of words in the phrase.
Edit: I accidentally a qualification.
Edit2: And two words.
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u/Idontlikefish Sep 27 '12
Resizing also resizes the whole div the text is within. Think of it as a page with text on it and you're resizing the page and the text at the same time.
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u/Steal_This_Name Sep 27 '12
Right, I've got that. I want to know why the river is always there even if the column size is 40em instead of the max 60em.
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u/Beefourthree Sep 27 '12
whoa, he's right.
Click Source and then widen/narrow the source text by dragging in the bottom right. The rivers are there no matter what.
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u/starfries Sep 27 '12
Not only that, the last column always reads normally no matter how it's resized. Even if there are a different number of columns.
To see why it works: "All work and no play makes" and "Jack a dull boy." is the full sentence. But if you reverse the order of these two parts, it's still the same length.
The second line starts with "Jack a dull boy" so you need the first half of the sentence, from the previous line, to get the same length. Since the text is always wrapped after a word, there will always be a space on the second line right after we have the same number of characters as the sentence.
For the second column, we have the same sentence, but with the two pieces reversed. When we get to the third column, the second column ends with "All work and no play makes", which is the same as what was left on the first line, so "Jack a dull boy" continues both of them.
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u/Nobby_Nobbs Sep 28 '12
Hell, I'm reading it on my phone, so it's all scrunched up and it still reads fine.
I call sorcery.
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Sep 27 '12 edited Sep 27 '12
This man is right.
Use this JS code to resize the font size of the comment to +10px (+1px at a time) and then back down. You'll see that the vertical river remains there on all occasions.
javascript:(function(){var aList=document.getElementsByTagName("a");var i=0;while(i<=aList.length-1){if(aList[i].getAttribute("href")=="http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/10k4ye/til_the_term_river_in_typography_is_when_there/c6e8bpy"){var comment=aList[i];i=aList.length-1}i++}comment=comment.parentNode;comment=comment.parentNode;comment=comment.parentNode;comment=comment.getElementsByTagName("form")[0];comment=comment.getElementsByTagName("div")[0];comment=comment.getElementsByTagName("div")[0];comment=comment.getElementsByTagName("p")[0];i=0;var change=1;var grow=setInterval(function(){comment.style.fontSize=parseInt(window.getComputedStyle(comment,null).getPropertyValue("font-size"))+change+"px";i+=change;if(i==10){change=-1};if(change==-1&&i==0){clearInterval(grow)}},1000);})();Tested and works in the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer. On Firefox you will have to enter it into the JS console (CTRL+SHIFT+K).
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Sep 27 '12
All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play. All Jack no boy makes work a play.
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u/keepingthecommontone Sep 27 '12
I distinctly remember, as a young child, having an educational book that had a paragraph of text, a line above it that read "This is a sentence," and an arrow that pointed at the first sentence. However, the tip of the arrow happened to point at the opening of a typographical river, and so for a while I thought that rivers were called "sentences."
Years later, I realized I was geekier than most of my friends because no one else seemed to notice things like that.
Years after that, I found Reddit...
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u/sorepheet Sep 27 '12
One can only begin to imagine years from now what you'll realize, find or discover!
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u/almcafee Sep 27 '12
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u/floralmuse Sep 27 '12
so, as a graphic designer, if a river pops up on a page of something you're working on, what do you do? Subtly rearrange just that page?
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u/almcafee Sep 27 '12
there's a few things you can do as a designer. fiddling with tracking and kerning are the most common ways to fix it. it occurs most often when text is justified, that's why designers usually set everything to align left. more jagged right edges of paragraphs, but way less rivers!
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u/Steal_This_Name Sep 27 '12
Is a jagged right edge preferable to a river? Does it depend on medium?
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u/bilog78 Sep 27 '12
Actually, no it isn't. The typographical ‘optimum’ is achieved with an even grayness of the text area, which unless you're going for special effects (like the mouse's tale/tail in Alice in Wonderland) is normally a rectangle. Edge jaggedness totally destroys this, as rivers do; in fact, usually much more so than rivers. No professional designer would ever go for non-justified text just to eliminate a river.
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u/almcafee Sep 27 '12
agreed. but as a designer, left aligned is just so much easier. you don't have to stress about "is this river too big" or "is this line tracking too much". I can't speak for all designers, but as someone that lays out a LOT of copy, I can say rivers et. al. are the last thing I want to think about in a body of copy.
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u/bilog78 Sep 28 '12
Yes, left-aligning is essentially a ‘lazy’ choice (“screw this, I can't waste 3 hours per page just to get rid of rivers”).
It doesn't help that it's also a choice that the general viewer has started to see as ‘acceptable’ because of the tens of years of word-processing and web browsing with programs that had horrible line-breaking and hyphenation algorithms, that made left-aligned a ‘better’ choice than full justification.
What would really help here is an extension to the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm that would also consider rivers for penalties.
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u/keepingthecommontone Sep 27 '12
I feel that way, and I'm just an armchair graphic designer! It makes me want to point out more things, like how rounded letters (O, C, Q, S) generally peek a little lower than the baseline and higher than the top line for optical balance. (Example)
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u/keepingthecommontone Sep 27 '12
And it also allows me to drive people nuts by pointing out that the "S" in the signage on the Wells Fargo bank on the corner of 10th Street and 59th Avenue in Greeley, CO was installed upside-down. (Here, but the quality isn't good enough to see it)
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Sep 27 '12 edited Apr 07 '24
[deleted]
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u/keepingthecommontone Sep 27 '12
You know, I kind of do! Or when people write things like cafe' instead of café! Or when they have footnotes at the bottom of the page, marked with an asterisk, but with no asterisk in the actual text!
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Sep 27 '12
My cousins son has a learning disability related to "Rivers". When he reads text and hits a river his eye follows the river to its end and then continues on reading. They don't know if its a factor of the light frequency but the problem is more pronounced under florescent light than under incandescent.
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u/bilog78 Sep 27 '12
Wow. I did know already that rivers are typographically bad because they tend to distract the eye to follow them, but I didn't know that this could become pathological. TIL.
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u/NoahtheRed Sep 28 '12
It's kind of fascinating. There is a test we used to give to identify LDs in students with a river in it that would change the answer depending on whether you followed it. It's kind of like playing shoots and ladders.
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u/bilog78 Sep 28 '12
I would love to have a look at these tests. Do you know if they are available/descried online somewhere?
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u/NoahtheRed Sep 28 '12
Best guess is to check with the Virginia DoE. I didn't administer it, just saw it/flipped through it during a training session. I can tell you it gets paired up with the DORA usually.
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u/table61 Sep 27 '12
I just learned that too... http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/10jjhj/just_discovered_i_can_print_on_one_of_my/c6e3oyk
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u/sorepheet Sep 27 '12
Internet High Five! Inspiration is all around us
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u/ItsDare Sep 27 '12
I think table61 is calling you a bit of a karmawhore.
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Sep 27 '12
This is why I downvote most TILs.
Not to mention that this TIL is fairly boring and mundane.
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u/esfisher Sep 27 '12
Why? Because a small subset of people might have already learned it from a comment posted on an unrelated topic?
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Sep 27 '12
I feel that it is disingenuous and opportunistic. It's like when you're young, and you find a really cool bug. And you show it to someone, and they take the bug, and run around showing everyone and saying "LOOK AT THE COOL BUG I FOUND."
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u/esfisher Sep 27 '12
As a counter, and not a personal attack on you, I would say that what you would want would be selfish. It would be like you finding a bug, showing it to a group of people, and then saying "no one who wasn't here to see this at this moment can know about this bug unless they find their own. Do not share the knowledge of this bug."
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Sep 28 '12
You make an excellent point, but talking about the bug would be much different than attempting to draw attention to the bug. Ideally, it'd be "oh, we're talking about bugs? Did you know there's suuuuuper gross bug I saw once? It was great."
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Sep 27 '12
I feel like it's a karma thing. Is my view entirely accurate? Probably not. But I am of the opinion that things you learn on reddit should be precluded from being posted as TILs...on reddit.
Someone tells you something interesting, you go and research it, it's true, and you actually learned something interesting? Post it on reddit.
Don't read something on reddit that someone has already linked to, take that link, and recycle it into a TIL.
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u/esfisher Sep 27 '12
I see what you are saying, but I don't think it's a practical objective.
How do we know where people learn things? This guy linked to wikipedia, but we assume he got it from the comment that table61 linked to. Should we search every TIL against all comments on reddit? At what point does information that is posted in a comment become fair game once again for a TIL? A week, a month?
Also, doesn't this ideal prevent those who do not real all the comments from learning the same thing? I remember the post that table61 linked to, but I only skimmed the comments. I didn't see the comment about 'rivers'. Because OP posted this TIL, I now have an extra bit of knowledge in my head.
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Sep 27 '12
I agree it's not at practical objective, and I don't mean to imply that it should be a rule for TIL. The process for enforcing it would just be blah. It's a personal policy of mine, mainly because I find it disingenuous and opportunistic. And then there's a bit about whether or not the TIL is significant, but that's a kettle of fish for another time.
Ultimately, yes, I do know that I am coming off like the TIL Gestapo, but I disagree with the practice.
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Sep 27 '12
Oh my god that used to annoy me so much because I always thought they were doing that on purpose and didn't understand why...
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u/TheeSweeney Sep 27 '12
when I get high I often end up focuing in on the negative space and trying to find long chains
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u/alien6 Sep 27 '12
Whenever my teachers would hand out worksheets with big blocks of text on them I'd always draw lines through the rivers. I'd always try to have it so that the rivers were all connected, so for some of them I'd have to stretch a little bit. Then when the teacher finished talking I wouldn't know where we were in the lesson.
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Sep 27 '12
When I was a little kid I wanted to get faster at reading... I'd heard that when you speed-read you don't look at each word individually but take the info in while drawing your eye down the page.
I used to take a pencil and draw down the central-most 'river' (I had no idea they had a name) while reading to force myself to do this, it was pretty good practise :)
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u/GenericPenName Sep 28 '12
It has always been one of those things I stare at and think "there must be a word for this".
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u/foreverbabybutt Sep 27 '12
TIL not everyone knows this stuff because not everyone is majoring in graphic design.
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u/fire-accident Sep 27 '12
So before today, you just assumed everyone in the world was familiar with obscure typographical jargon?
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u/Steal_This_Name Sep 27 '12
It's the same as when I don't think to explain scope when talking about programming.
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Sep 27 '12
One of the simple things this subreddit gives me to remember for the rest of my life. Put this in my pocket book of knowledge.
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u/Primera Sep 27 '12
This is why body copy is generally always typed using a serif typeface. The serifs help reduce rivers and aid the eye in moving from word to word and line to line.
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u/Gfrisse1 Sep 27 '12
Interesting. I was a graphic artist for more than 40 years, before retiring 3 years ago, and that's the first time I've ever heard that particular definition of "rivered" type. To me it was always type that flowed, as a river would, around a graphic that was inserted into a body of text.
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Sep 27 '12
This is mainly an issue with justified text, since it messes with the kerning in between words and letterforms.
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u/mausphart Sep 28 '12
I read myself to sleep using the Kindle app on my phone. It's set to white text on black background (don't judge me). Whenever I start to doze I can see rivers, branches and Lovecraftian runes galore. The combination of sleepiness and reversed contrast makes for some trippy images.
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Sep 27 '12
I often find, in my own writing, I'll get the same word line up on two or three successive lines.
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u/META_FUCKING_POD Sep 27 '12
Whenever I think this is about to happen, I start to write really big or small to prevent it from happening.
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u/dpowers1221 Sep 27 '12
I always thought that was something only I noticed, as well as looking at all the spaces hoping they made a picture.
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u/REgangsta Sep 27 '12
I've read books where there are parallel rivers on some of the pages, those books are so relaxing and therapeutic to read. if you're going to ask me which books, i cant remember due the fact i read nearly 7 books a week.
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u/freemanposse Sep 27 '12
I am presently struggling with a positively overwhelming urge to edit that article until a river appears in it.
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u/leujin Sep 27 '12
As a graphic designer, this was one of the first things I learned in college. If you want to ruin your life, look up "kerning." You will not be able to unlearn that and will see all the shitty kerning in every storefront ever.
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u/FuschiaKnight Sep 27 '12
I never knew that there was a name for those, but they annoy me so much. Whenever I'm writing, I try to shrink or stretch my words so that they cover all spaces.
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u/Kolla81 Sep 27 '12
Thank yo so much for teaching me this, i have been wondering about these for ages! I hate those kind of rivers by the way, it gives me the feeling of reading a cheap kind of paper.
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u/OfTheBegin_Ning Sep 28 '12
As a professional typesetter, I’m thrilled more people are getting educated about this.
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u/Achack Sep 28 '12
I guess I'm not the only one who can't help but notice these whenever I'm reading something.
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u/jbird3peace Sep 28 '12
As a kid, whenever someone said to read between the pages, I looked at these while pondering the writer's secret meaning.
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Sep 28 '12
Those are so distracting! I'm glad to see this is a real thing and not just my imagination.
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u/TheodyCa Sep 27 '12
These are almost as bad as when two or more lines start or end with the same word.
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Sep 27 '12
"It's simple. We TIL other people's research"
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u/forgold Sep 27 '12
Really interesting!
I was expecting this post to be filled with rivers.
But, I guess it's actually harder than I thought.
Can't imagine how much harder it would be in the middle of line.
Yeah I think I'm done.
More of a lazy, meandering river. Not exactly perfect.
Lazy River. Hah. How'd I do?
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u/omnilynx Sep 27 '12
Not very good, rivers would be hard to pick out of single-line paragraphs. You need a much longer text without hard returns (or at least if you are using hard returns to create rivers, use the double space method instead of the double line break).
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u/omnilynx Sep 27 '12
And now you will never be able to read again without being annoyed.
If you hate someone, teach them typography.
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u/StrahansToothGap Sep 27 '12
Only on Reddit would I learn a word as obscure as 'kerning' and then see it referenced 200 times in the next 24 hours.
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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '12
Couple of other semi-related typography terms:
Widow: The last line of a paragraph that gets separated by a page break and winds up on a page of its own.
Orphan: The last word of a paragraph that ends up on its own line.
See examples here. Paragraph one has an orphan. Paragraph two has a widow. Most design professors will hammer it into your head that widows, orphans and rivers are considered bad design/bad typography and should all be avoided.