@mitch I gather from context that a word gutter means something like a vertical block of words that all end or begin at the same horizontal column? When I searched, I got a lot of stuff about setting gutter margins in Microsoft Word.
The closest I get to "design" is adjusting my LaTeX documents to eliminate overfull hboxes, so I think your assessment of different uses for different scenarios is probably on the money.
@mitch I can certainly see them - I would guess this text was composed to illustrate the feature deliberately, since there's some mid-line hyphenation that doesn't seem to serve any other purpose.
I'm curious now as to what other typist "best practices" I learned that would be badly received in the design world:
- Interleaved replies, rather than top-posting?
- Aligning columns of numeric data to the decimal point, not left- or right-justified?
- Wrapping text to 72 columns to allow space for a few levels of reply quoting?
@khird it's a unique phenomenon where the spaces between words form negative space that becomes obvious due to how the human brain processes lines.
Here's a good example. If you can't see it, load the image up and look at it from across the room.