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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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[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago

Let me take you back to punched card days, when people would design patterns and shapes using different characters, a single line at a time (one card, one line of 80 characters).

When the cards were just printed (to a nice, noisy, dot-matrix), you'd see the image they designed.

this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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