🚀 go-pugleaf

One also has to consider that as designers we train our eyes to find things, and soon those things start to "pop out" to us in a way that doesn't occur to the regular reader. We have to differeniate things that we don't like from things that actually cause the reader to slow down.

For instance, I don't think that readers are slowed by a single hyphen (except at the end of a recto page). But if there are three in a row (or more) then you might have the reader's eye stop and look at this pattern. A designer or editor might discover a "river of white" that would be unnoticeable by a reader ... normally dangerous rivers only happen when formed by a gap of over-wide spaces.

A reader won't usually mind if slanted roman is used for italics, but a typographer will shudder. Even the curly quotes are pretty much an affectation of the typographer. We consider straight quotes to be wrong, but the user doesn't, and will read over them as if they were correct.

It is nice to make it look nice, but sometimes doing this is too costly.