Having some background in typesetting and typography, I don’t think in near term text-wrap: balance would be as good as human eye for headlines.
In a sentence like “One year on and what next for remote working?”, “what next” is a stable phrase and breaking it up is jarring. Either of the below reads better:
> One year on
> and what next
> for remote working?
or:
> One year on and what next
> for remote working?
(On the Web you can achieve those with non-breaking spaces, word joiners, and other similar HTML entities.)
— As a hard rule with rare exceptions, don’t break after conjunctions or short modifying words such as “and”, “the”, “on”, etc.—carry them to the next line.
— As a more vague rule of thumb, do not break after a word that is tightly coupled to the next one (this includes stable phrases and short idioms, adjective-noun combinations, and so on), unless intentionally for word play.
Just one of those small things that together make for clean and readable headlines and GUI copy.
In a sentence like “One year on and what next for remote working?”, “what next” is a stable phrase and breaking it up is jarring. Either of the below reads better:
> One year on
> and what next
> for remote working?
or:
> One year on and what next
> for remote working?
(On the Web you can achieve those with non-breaking spaces, word joiners, and other similar HTML entities.)
— As a hard rule with rare exceptions, don’t break after conjunctions or short modifying words such as “and”, “the”, “on”, etc.—carry them to the next line.
— As a more vague rule of thumb, do not break after a word that is tightly coupled to the next one (this includes stable phrases and short idioms, adjective-noun combinations, and so on), unless intentionally for word play.
Just one of those small things that together make for clean and readable headlines and GUI copy.