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Do line breaks have to be arbitrary?
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Do line breaks have to be arbitrary?
Line breaks in continuous text are arbitrary. They happen when you reach the end of the available space.
But you can often improve multi-line headings by forcing a line break at meaningful points. This is sometimes known as a semantic line break.
Occasionally, designers try the idea of applying semantic line breaks to all paragraphs in a book. It’s an idea that re-emerges from time to time.
For example, the Swiss typographer Karl Gerstner uses it in his magnificently programmatic Compendium for Literates.1
There are a couple of problems with this, I think. Firstly it doesn’t really make it easier to read. For me the poem-like quality of the system draws attention to the language and, paradoxically, away from the sense. As well as poems, we associate deliberate line endings with lists.
And there is still a set width to the column, so some lines may end up with arbitrary breaks anyway.
Various researchers have experimented with similar ideas with unimpressive results (reviewed by James Hartley, 1980).2
And semantic line breaks have been used in religious texts3 – notably the Washburn College Bible, which refers to this technique as ‘phrasing’.4 It makes sense here, since religious texts can be seen as poetry and are often read aloud.
1. Gerstner, K. (1974). Compendium for literates: A system of writing. MIT Press.
2. Hartley, J. (1980). Spatial cues in text. Visible Language, 14, 62-79.
3. Cuming, G. (1990). Liturgical typography: A plea for sense-lining. Information Design Journal, 6, 89-92. He refers to ‘sense lining’, but in my view this doesn’t communicate its meaning as well as semantic line break. After all, we don’t ordinarily use the term ‘lining’ to mean breaking lines of text.
4. The Washburn College Bible. (1980). Oxford University Press.