As much as I love the Paragraph Composer in InDesign, its omnipotent control over how lines break is sometimes maddening. If nine out of ten lines in a paragraph have perfect breaks, and you want to make it ten out of ten (without actually editing the text), forget it! The Paragraph Composer will thwart you at every turn, insisting on rebreaking additional lines that had been perfect as you try applying old standbys like No Break, soft returns, and tracking strategic selections in and out.
Can you tell I’ve just spent the past hour or so wrestling with this?
Before you start tsk-tsking me, I already KNOW that yes, the Paragraph Composer is allowing a bad break for a reason, because “fixing” it would result in worse breaks elsewhere in the paragraph. Nonetheless, I’m the designer, not the Composer, and I have the last word! Sheesh! I want to be able to say these line breaks are hammered in stone, you’re only allowed to modify this line and the next as I fiddle with settings.
But … there is no such ability in InDesign, unless you turn off the Paragraph Composer all together, and go back to the Stone Age Single-Line Composer (which often rebreaks every line in the paragraph as soon as you choose it–out of spite, it feels like).
In the end, I prevailed, but only by using a technique I seldom employ because I forget it exists: Increase/Decrease Word Spacing. If you find yourself in the same wrestling match, you should give it a try.
Let me show you how it saved the day. First, the problem child paragraph was similar to this one:
Now, you may not like the tight word spacing on the third line, but my client was fine with it (he prefers tight word spacing), and that’s what the Paragraph Composer said was best, so whom am I to judge. ;-)
But, do you see how “Acme Company Creative PR” breaks in the middle of the paragraph? My client flagged it and asked me to bring up “PR” so it’d all be on one line. The word spacing in the line above appears to have plenty of room to handle it, and the Desired Word Spacing for the paragraph style was 95%, so I didn’t think it’d be an issue.
And thus the wrestling match began. Selecting “Creative PR” and choosing No Break from the Control Panel menu resulted in this:
What the heck? Why didn’t it bring either just PR up, or just Creative PR down? So then I tried selecting the entire phrase, “Acme Company Creative PR” and setting it to No Break. Still no joy:
Argh. I cleared out all the No Breaks and tried other tactics (forced line breaks, tracking the entire paragraph in and out) from my old bag of tricks, to no avail. The Paragraph Composer refused to simply bring up PR and leave everything else alone. Reverting to the Single-Line Composer didn’t help at all, the line breaks got worse, so I switched back.
I knew I was flailing when I found myself in the Justification dialog box with its Preview box checked, incrementing the percentages up and down in single points…
… because of course, I had no clue which magical combination of numbers would make the Paragraph Composer do what I wanted. And when it finally did budge PR up a line, so many other lines in the paragraph got stupid looking, since changes in this dialog box affect the entire paragraph.
I was thinking to myself, “I don’t want to decrease the word spacing for the entire paragraph, I just want to decrease it in the single line above PR! This dern InDesign, why won’t it let me change word spacing for a single line!”
Then, ding! Somewhere an angel got his wings. I suddenly remembered, yes, brainiac, InDesign does let you do that. A quick trip to Online Help reminded me of the keyboard shortcuts, since there is no menu command or Control panel field for adjusting word spacing.
I reset the paragraph to its base paragraph style so I could start fresh, then selected the line above PR and tapped Option-Command-Delete a couple times to reduce its word spacing. Success!
When I turn on highlighting for Custom Kerning/Tracking in Preferences > Composition, you can see the word kerning in action:
In retrospect, I could’ve done the same thing manually by clicking in between the words and reducing the Kern amount … and I have done that before … but it was nice to have another keyboard shortcut “weapon” in my occasional battles with the Paragraph Composer. I thought you’d appreciate knowing about it, too.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on July 9, 2008
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Thanks for such a useful post. Just a notice: For decreasing the space between words Cmd + Shift + Delete didn’t work for me but Cmd + Shift + Backspace. For increment, Cmd + Shift + \ worked just fine. (I am using full Apple keyboard on MacBook Pro, InDesign CC.)
@karin, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that has anything to do with this blog post. Try clicking on Forums at the top of the page and posting there?
i have plenty of white frames – around images with and without trasparency – and all my text! I can’t see any of it on my PC, but depending on what kind of mac I open the PDF, it gets wors. Sometimes I can’t see the text at all – leopard is really bad. It is supposed to be an on screen presentation – so I could not care less on how it prints. I am really desperate and have no idea how I could solve tis issue. Please help!
To the previous author:
Sorry, your comments turned into a sequence of (?????) question marks.
Try differerent encoding.
Thanks, Anne-Marie. I was wrangling with a similar couple of paragraphs about a month ago, and I wish I had taken advantage of this option then. But I know I’ll be using this soon enough. It’s the frequency at which you post this sort of in-the-trenches discovery that really places this site head-and-shoulders above so many others!
Wow! I wish I would have known about this the last couple of years. I deal with this type of client all the time in ad work and also in the editorial part of the magazine that I assist in. I always ended up reverting to kerning in the whole section of type, of course it ended up being something like -35 which is on the threshold.
Sorry, guys ? my mistake!
I just checked and turning off Paragraph Composer does indeed alter the line breaks sometimes.
It seems odd that it works this way. I’d rather “Paragraph Composer” be a button that you press, rather than a fixed setting. When you press the button, it helps you out with the selected text (or text boxes), then hands control back to you.
Anyway, it never seems to be a problem for me to get it to look fine manually pretty quickly. I do it without thinking.
Just to clarify, I never turn Paragraph Composer off in any kind of preferences ? only for individual paragraphs that I want to tweak.
Also, Lee, the simple act of switching to the Single Line Composer very often changes the line breaks– more than 80% of the time in my experience — even before you touch a single thing. (If it didn’t, I too would often switch to it toward the end of a project, just to get full control over final line break tweaks.)
I’m not sure why your experience is different. I’m assuming it’s a peculiar combination of your paragraph style settings and the length of words/column widths you most commonly deal with in your projects.
But if you drag out an empty frame that’s two or three inches wide and fill it with placeholder text, and the text is styled with the default Basic Paragraph style, switching to Single-Line composer will most likely change a line break or two … especially if you make the paragraphs fully justified. (Though it happens with left-justified too.)
Lee, the benefit of Paragraph Composer is that you have to do much less manual tweaking and you tend to get a more even color across the paragraph than you do with single-line composer. Check out this wonderful quote.
On the other hand, you’re right: Para Composer can be a real pain if you’re trying to get a line “just right” by hand. There’s nothing wrong with turning it off; but I would argue that you should leave it on most of the time.
I never hesitate to turn Composer off if I want to change something manually. When you turn it off, everything stays exactly as Composer left it, apart from you’re free to make your own changes.
I don’t really see why everyone is so keen to leave Composer turned on? It only takes a few seconds to check over a paragraph and get it looking right manually (as we had to do every time back in the Quark days).
Or am I missing something?
This IS an excellent tip! I just hope I remember it the next time I need ? you know, you never need it until you forget about it…
Excellent tip!!! I remember reading it in the RealWorld book, but whenever I need it I always forget about it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve restled with that darn justification settings dialog. Hopefully now it will finally stick in my head.
Of course, I didn’t mean to imply anything else, other than the basic rules that govern the paragraph composer. It looks totally random when you change the settings, but knowing why it’s doing what it’s doing relieves some of the stress, I think.
Hi Eugene … Re selecting the entire company name, I tried that — see the third screenshot in the story above.
I’m not saying the Paragraph Composer is always so difficult to deal with (many many times I’ve selected No Break and gotten just what I wanted), it’s that when it doesn’t do what I need/expect, it’s almost impossible to force it to comply. ;-)
The increase/decrease word spacing trick was just the ticket in this particular situation.
Yeh I found out that the Paragraph Composer ranks the breaking points, and good breakpoints are preferred over bad ones. Reducing tracking/kerning in words or letters causes the all the breaking points to be re-ranked and then it re-adjusts all the lines of text. The letter spacing evenness is one it’s highest priorities. The possible breakpoints are selected by how much the word and letter spacing varies from the Desired settings.
The single line composer doesn’t do that, but that has it’s own problems.
That brings me to a wishlist I had for adobe, and mentioned it a while back, you should be able to select how many widows or orphans you have for a a paragraph, like the Keep Lines Together feature, there should be a way to say how many words you want to end a paragraph with.
Out of curiousity how would selecting the entire company name and choosing the No Break function from the character panel have worked?