Rag Time

Aesthetic rags; it’s such a poetic notion. The rags I’m referring to, of course, belong to blocks of type without justified margins, and the shapes that those rags create merit your attention.
Unlike older typesetting systems, today’s page-layout programs no longer address the issue of aesthetic rag controls. That’s odd, because the margin shapes and patterns created by lines of varying length can make a big difference in how your pages look. It’s doubly odd because both Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress offer tools to give you control over your rags, but how to use them effectively isn’t discussed in the documentation.
When managing ragged margins, you have two main concerns. The first is the wildness of the rag: how much variation there is between the length of the long lines and the short lines.
Figure 1. The paragraph on the left displays a fairly wild rag, even though hyphenation is allowed. After I make hyphenation controls more liberal, the same text on the right shows a much less wild rag.

Your second concern is shapes: Line endings created automatically by your program may inadvertently yield distracting shapes along the margin, from steps, to divots, to bulges and skews.
Figure 2. It looks like someone—or something—took a bite out of this text. Distracting margin shapes like this disrupt the harmonious appearance of a page.

Of course, in some situations—notably in centered matter—you may want specific shapes, but as is so often the case in typography, making what you want is easier than avoiding what you don’t.
The Wild Side
There are no rules about how wild a rag should be. (Curiously, in type-speak, there is no opposite to wild—there are no tame rags, for example—only less wild, wild, and wilder.) It’s basically an aesthetic decision. To my eye, though, a very wild rag in narrow-measure type is not a pretty thing.
Figure 3. The text on the left, reproduced from the French newspaper Liberation, is set 9 on 9 over a 12-pica measure. The lack of hyphenation plus some apparently manual line-ending decisions give it a very wild rag, resulting in some lines that barely fill half the measure. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I’d say that this rag is too wild for the width of the column. In the version on the right, hyphenation is allowed, creating a less chaotic rag.

Very wild rags in narrow measures can start to look more like a list of words and phrases than a stream of running of text.
To control the wildness of your rags, your main tool is hyphenation control. (For the full nine yards on controlling hyphenation, look at my previous column, “Hy-phen-a-tion.” The more restrictive your hyphenation settings, the wilder your rag will be. XPress and InDesign both offer the following controls for this:
• Turn off hyphenation. Without recourse to hyphenation, your program can only fill a line using whole words, creating the wildest rag possible.
• Limit the number of characters allowed before and after a line-breaking hyphen. The larger these numbers, the wilder the rag will become, because your program won’t be able to fill out lines with very small word fragments.
• Limit the number of consecutive lines that can end with a hyphen. If you choose a value of 1, it’s more likely that the line after a hyphenated line will set well short of the margin, creating a wilder rag.
• Take advantage of your program’s “hyphenation zone” setting. This allows you to limit where—relative to the right-hand margin—hyphenation can occur.
The specifics of how hyphenation zones work in InDesign and XPress are complicated, but these basic truths hold: In InDesign, the larger the value you specify for the hyphenation zone, the wilder your rag will be. In XPress, both very large and small values yield wilder rags, with variations in moderate values yielding finer controls.
In InDesign, the hyphenation zone is defined in the Hyphenation Settings dialog box, accessed from the Paragraph palette menu. Here you specify how much white space you will allow to appear at the end of an unjustified line. When you make this space smaller, the program will hyphenate more liberally (see Figure 4 below). A word that begins to the left of the hyphenation zone will still be hyphenated, because if it weren’t, the space remaining at the end of the line would exceed the width of the hyphenation zone. This works only when using InDesign’s Single-line Composer.

In XPress, where the hyphenation zone is defined in the Edit/H&Js dialog box, it’s more complicated. In XPress, the hyphenation zone defines a space measured from the right-hand margin into which a legal hyphenation point must land in order for the word to be broken. If you specify a value of 1 pica, for example, all hyphenated lines will end within 1 pica of the right-hand margin.
You would think, then, that a setting of “0” would effectively prevent all hyphenation, as no hyphenation point can fall into a zero-width zone. But in fact, a zero setting simply turns off the hyphenation zone function, and hyphenation occurs normally, without restriction.
To create a very wild rag in XPress, you can specify a very narrow hyphenation zone, meaning that the only lines that hyphenate are those that very nearly fill the measure. Few lines will fill the bill. Specifying a very large hyphenation zone can also create a wild rag, because XPress will not hyphenate a word at the end of a line if the word before it also falls within the hyphenation zone. As Figure 5 below demonstrates, working with intermediate values is the path to a tighter, less wild rag.

InDesign has a couple of other ways to influence the rags of your text, but curiously, neither of them allows you any explicit control over how they work.
The first is to choose, from the Paragraph palette menu, to use either the Adobe Single-line Composer or the Adobe Paragraph Composer. The first composes your text one line at a time, without regard to any lines before or after ii in its paragraph. The Paragraph Composer looks at the entire paragraph’s line endings and tries to choose line endings that provide the best-looking text. In justified text, this means selecting line endings that offer the most consistent word and character spacing from line to line. But in ragged-margin text, it means choosing line endings that provide the most even overall rag for the paragraph. This may mean pushing a word to the next line even though it would fit on the one before. Note, though, that using the Paragraph Composer prevents you from using the Hyphenation Zone settings.
The last InDesign rag-management option is choosing Balance Lines from the Paragraph palette menu. This was designed mainly for use with headline type, to avoid two-line titles in which one line is much longer than the other. But it also works with whole paragraphs.
Figure 6. The following samples show InDesign’s Single-line Composer, Paragraph Composer, and Balances Lines options in action. The results of choosing one or the other is not always predictable, and none of them provide any variables by which you can control their effects.

Neither InDesign nor XPress allows you to use character- and word-space controls to affect the ragged look of your text. When setting ragged-margin text in either program, you can specify an “optimum” (XPress, through its Edit/H&Js dialog) or “desired” (InDesign, through the Justification dialog in the Paragraph palette menu) value for word and character spaces, but you can’t define maximum or minimum spacing values. (Well, you can, but the programs ignore them.) This means that word and character spaces are always identical from line to line in ragged-margin copy, and you can’t encourage a tighter rag by allowing the program to flex these spaces while composing your type.
The Shapes of Things
In short passages of text—ad copy, for example—you may want the ragged margins of your text to have obvious shapes. This is particularly true in centered type.
Figure 7. In this old ad—coincidentally set in letterpress type—the lines of authors’ names have been broken deliberately to create rounded margins.

When you want shaped margins, your best bet is to break lines by hand using a forced line-break command. This breaks a line without starting a new paragraph. In both InDesign and XPress, the keyboard shortcut for this is Shift-Return. When breaking lines by hand, be careful where you position your cursor, to make sure you don’t accidentally push a word space down to begin the next line. It’s an easy mistake to make and an easy one to overlook, especially in centered text.
But in long texts, as in magazine or journal work, random rags are best, as shaped margins can be eye-catching and jump out of the page. In these cases, you should regard shapes as problems that need to be fixed.
Figure 8. A random change in type specs gave the second paragraph here a distinct potbelly. When surrounded on a page by paragraphs with a squared-off margin shape, a shaped margin like this is a distracting feature.

The easiest way to eliminate odd shapes is to slightly tweak the tracking of all or part of the affected paragraph, causing it to re-rag. Where you can see that changing the hyphenation would create a better rag, you can change the minimum number of number of characters before or after a hyphen for that paragraph only.
However you decide to effect a fix, it’s best to avoid treatments that may come back to haunt you later, should your type specs or layout change. For example, creating a new break by hard-ending a line using a line-break command will probably create a line break in an undesirable place if the text reflows. Likewise, barring the hyphenation of a word to prevent it breaking may also cause problems later. If this is your best option, though, in both InDesign and XPress, the easiest way to prevent a word from hyphenating is to put a discretionary hyphen in front of it (InDesign Mac: Shift-Command-hyphen; InDesign Windows: Shift-Ctrl-hyphen; XPress Mac: Command-hyphen; XPress Windows: Ctrl-hyphen).
Inserting discretionary hyphens in mid-word is also a way to coax your program into using your preferred break point for a hyphenated word. This also lets you customize the rag.
There are a lot of things to pay attention to when you’re refining your type, so consider creating a checklist of things to look for when you’re proofing your pages. Somewhere on that list, add Check Rags.
 

James Felici has worked in the publishing industry for over 30 years. He is the former managing editor of Publish magazine, and written for PC World, Macworld, and The Seybold Report. A renowned type expert, he is the author of The Complete Manual of Typography.
  • Anonymous says:

    I don’t know why you are hyphenating ragged type to begin with. Typographic standards (the old ones that is) would never allow it. If you’re redefining those standards, then that’s another story.

  • HawaiiBill says:

    James Felici does yeoman work in a short space, helping shape less ragged right sides if an unjustified column. Hope I didn’t miss it but one trick that sometimes works but Felici didn’t note is to reduce or enlarge type size by one-half point in paragraphs that refuse to bend to the typographers will. I know. That’s not fair but every now and then it can make an attractive difference.

    Hawai`i Bill ——-
    An old man, a writer who likes people, living in the middle of the Pacific ocean near volcanoes, in tradewinds among soft bird songs.

  • felici says:

    Hyphenating ragged-margin type has a very long history, pre-dating Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type. The earliest printed example I could find in my own library is a reproduction of a page from a Book of Hours from Northern France, produced in the late 15th century. The practice has continued on throughout the centuries and across continents, so I’m not sure where your rigid standards are practiced. For a more contemporary example, I recommend the excellent book Printing Types (Beacon Press, 1990) by Alexander S. Lawson, Jr., (Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology) and typographer and book designer Dwight Agner. The entire book is set rag-right and liberally hyphenated.

  • felici says:

    I don’t think it’s good practice to change point size in the middle of a text stream. Even a half-point adjustment is going to be noticeable. A bettter approach to forcing text to reflow is to adjust tracking slightly. It occurs to me only now that you could also apply a right-hand indent to the pesky paragraph that’s just enough to get the longest line to break at a new point. Sorry, that tip should have been in the article as well.

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