Dear InDesigners,
I am new-ish to InDesign but finding my way around quite well. However there is one area that is infuriating and there must be a better way.
I am designing a small book of short stories. Each story is up to 6 pages and made up of various length paragraphs, some including speech. The author is an artist who is very frustrated by the default kerning and tracking and said to me “Penguin publish millions of cheap books they can’t be adjusting every line!”. Well, in truth he is very pernickety and why not this is his crafted work; so having an artist’s eye he will look long and hard at every line.
What my author wants is fully justified text, but it has to be balanced and beautiful, and even when you want ‘fully justified’ the last line may be ragged and finish before the right margin. This doesn’t seem unreasonable but it would appear to be very hard to achieve!
I have altered the justification defaults to attempt to get a better starter-for-ten. No matter what I do there are always paragraphs that are really ugly and unacceptable – and I don’t mean one or two, which would be manageable, but a lot. I am left asking myself what on earth InDesign is doing and how it can present such awful word distribution.
The first thing I tackled was the last line problem: InDesign ridiculously made every last line fully justified so we end up with some last lines that are really gappy with ugly word distribution. I expected that in the justification settings it would be possible to configure last line rules but this doesn’t seem to exist. So the solution I came up with was a global edit to add a tab at the end of each paragraph and that has made a huge difference.
I wonder if there is a guide anywhere about what InDesign’s approach to calculating tracking etc. is. For example does InDesign handle some text characteristics in a particular way, such as quotation marks (speech marks); these do often seen to be forced to a next line.
Is there a good guide to handling kerning and justification for prose and how to get the best, and the most efficient performance out of InDesign?
My final question is: is there an add-on that would help?
This has turned into something of an essay, so – if you have bothered – thank you for reading it, and I look forward to any suggestions.
Thank you……………….. liz
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