Reply To: Typography: letter spacing vs word spacing in book typography

Hey Magenta–I'm in book publishing as well. And with your column width I don't see how you could have too many loose lines. I think 28p8 is very good.

I would definitely use the paragraph composer. And with that being said, I'd set your hyphenation for only one hyphen limit (two if worse comes to worse). Then slide the slider over to “less hyphenation.” I think it will definitely give you what you want.

I'm not sure what your H&Js are, but you can always tweak them. I usually use 80% minimum, 95% optimum, and 120% for maximum. Our clients don't like letterspacing or allow it, although we sometimes manually kern an entire paragraph with a -5 or so to pull a line back.

In any event–I would definitely use the paragraph composer. If you use single composer you'll be doing a lot of tweaking of lines and it will take you twice as long to do the job.

doc