Hyphenation ladder

A ladder is three or more consecutive lines that all end in a hyphen. Each break is legitimate on its own: the word did not fit, the engine found a permitted point inside it, and it broke there. The defect is the run. Once the third hyphen lands under the second, the eye stops reading words and starts reading a column of dashes, because a repeated mark at a fixed interval is a texture and texture is louder than text.

Narrow measures cause it, and justified text makes it worse in the way that matters most: the right edge is flush, so every hyphen lands at the same horizontal position instead of at wherever the line happened to stop. That perfect alignment is what turns three hyphens into a staircase rather than into three unrelated marks. Ragged-right setting hides a ladder better without fixing it, which is why the fault is easy to ship in body copy and impossible to miss in a justified sidebar.

Hyphenation is the feature; a ladder is the defect the feature produces when nothing limits it. The property written for exactly this is hyphenate-limit-lines, which caps how many consecutive lines may end in a hyphen, and browser support for it is still thin. The dependable fixes are the blunt ones: widen the measure, raise hyphenate-limit-chars so short fragments stop qualifying, or turn hyphenation off in that block and accept a worse rag. Turning it off is not free, since hyphenation is what keeps a narrow justified column from opening rivers between the words.

The single-event faults are a different family. A runt is one word alone on a last line, a widow is a short last line pushed to the top of the next column, and an orphan is a first line stranded at the bottom of one. Each is judged in a single glance at one spot. A ladder is judged over several lines at once, which is why it survives proofreading that catches the others: nothing is wrong on any line you look at.