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submitted 7 months ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/til@lemmy.ca

In typography, rivers (or rivers of white) are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. Rivers can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts. Rivers are less noticeable with proportional fonts, due to narrow spacing. Another cause of rivers is the close repetition of a long word or similar words at regular intervals, such as "maximization" with "minimization" or "optimization".

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[-] prole@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago

House of Leaves uses a bunch of gimmicks like this... Kind of forget if he used "rivers" specifically, but I'd be kind of surprised if he hadn't.

this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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