DIVISION OF WORDS
When the words do not fit the line what shall we do? The early printers used only one kind of spaces. In setting a line of type they proceeded until there was no room in the line for the next complete word of the copy. Then they filled out the line with spaces and began the next word on the next line. The length of the register being known in advance and nothing but spaces being used in setting the line, the compositor was spared much that makes composition at once a hard labor and a fine art. The result was an irregular margin at the right such as we now see in typewritten letters.
With improvements in types and typography the squaring out of the page soon came into fashion. In many cases this can be done by the careful use of spaces so as to bring a certain number of words squarely out to the end of the line. There have been printers who have insisted that this should always be done. Their efforts have not, however, been successful. They result in a freakish looking page with white spots in the lines where letters or words have been spaced out to fill the register. It would be better, on the whole, to resort to the practice of the old masters and leave the right-hand margin irregular.
Ordinarily the difficulty has been met by dividing words and putting a part of a word on one line and the rest of it on another, indicating the break by a hyphen. The hyphen in such a case is always the closing character in the first line. Clearly this division must be so made as to assist the reader in his task. The primary purpose of all printing is to be read. Anything that adds to the legibility of the printing improves it; anything that detracts from its legibility harms it. How can we so divide words that the legibility and intelligibility of the text will be maintained, the line justified to register, and the beauty of the page enhanced? These ends—legibility, intelligibility, and beauty—are the aims of all the rules which have been devised for the division of words. These are the things the reader will see and by them he will judge the results. He will probably know nothing about the rules by which the compositor gains his results. The compositor needs to know the rules, but to remember always that they are only means by which to secure results.
There have been several attempts to devise systems of division, but no one of them is thoroughly consistent or universally adopted.
One system requires the division of a word when the pronunciation will permit on the vowel at the end of the syllable. It has the defect of making no provision for syllables that end in consonants. Moreover, if rigorously applied it would give us such divisions as ca-pa-ci-ty, cata-stro-phe, lexi-co-gra-pher, pre-fe-rence, pro-gno-sti-cate, and re-co-gnize.
Another system requires the division of consolidated words at the junction of their elements, for example:
magn-animous
cata-clysm
found-ation
oceano-graphy
theo-logy
know-ledge
lexi-co-grapher
in-fer-ence
pre-judice
pro-gnos-ticate
pro-position
typo-graphy
In some cases this rule would lead to queer looking divisions. More serious objections are that the system does not provide for words that are long enough to be divided but are yet not consolidated words, and, most of all, that the average compositor is not an accomplished etymologist and knows very little about the derivation, make up, and compounding of the words he has to set up. He may be familiar, for example with the word rheostat, but it would puzzle him to tell from what language it is derived, while the word enclave would probably send him to the dictionary for meaning as well as derivation, unless he happened to be used to one particular kind of writing.