How about flush-left?

http://www.google.com/search?q=h%26j+site%3Atypophile.com

I customize for each layout. In addition to doing it by eye, the option to highlight justification problems is useful as a gauge of how appropriate my settings are. However, I always start with something like this:

Josh

I think three factors must be considered: kind of font, column width and language. Of course, tests and eye-checking is mandatory. For books set in serif fonts and using Portuguese I adopt:

Word Spacing: 90 | 100 | 125
Letter Spacing: -3 | 0 | 3
Glyph Scaling: 100 | 100 | 100

This will produce more even spaces but increases hyphenation. As in Romance languages hyphenation is not an issue so annoying as in English (due to more regular syllabic construction), I prefer to priorize space distribution.

As a reference, Bringhurst advocates glyph scaling of –3% to +3% in Elements of Typographic Style.

Freiberger:

Just curious — why do you indicate that you don't use glyph scaling?

Josh

I think glyph scaling is a least resource as it causes glyph distortion –a very small one, but still a distortion. I use it just when other settings are not enough.

Almost all readers will never notice a 2 or 3% scaling. But I do and it's always possible other people notice it too. So I try to avoid any possible distortion in glyphs.

Of course, mine is a quite conservative approach.

Word spacing from 80% to 133% is much more apparent and may be more distracting than a mere 2% distortion of letters.

At 10pt type, 2% is a mere 0,07mm which I seriously doubt anybody can notice with their barenaked eye. Especially when type isn't geometric. 2% can easily be visually distorted as a factor of other parallaxes. So a perfectly 100% type can look more distorted due to rivers of space than 2% distorted with better fitting.

Just my 2 cents.

But it's true: God is in the detail when it comes to typography.

For most typefaces a Desired setting for the Word Space of 100% is way too wide… I mostly use a Desired setting in the order of 85–95%, with a Minimum set around 10% below that and a Maximum of around 10% over the Desired setting.

I concur with Freibergers opnion that glyph scaling can be noticable and use only a 1% divergence there. There ARE some typefaces that can withstand a more robust scaling (eg Caecilia, which I often use scaled to 92%), but I use that in a global fashion, not on a per line basis.

Letter Spacing has too much of an impact on the ‘colour’ of your typeblocks and reeks of cheap and nasty US-newspaper design (and a reminder that the Standard Settings of both InDesign and QuarkXPress have been hardcoded by US-engineers who haven been exposed too much to bad typography). A strict no-no in my book!