InReview: Typefitter 5

When I last reviewed Typefitter, way back in Issue #10, InDesign was only a few years old, Typefitter was owned by a different company, and the iPhone hadn’t even been announced yet. Despite all that’s happened in the last 15 years, one thing hasn’t changed: the need for well-set, beautifully spaced type. If setting text-heavy documents is your job, Typefitter can be an invaluable aid. Typefi’s newest version, Typefitter 5, adds a fresh look and some powerful new features to an already great software package.

What It Does

One of the reasons you use InDesign is to create professional-looking type, right? And one reason InDesign can create such great-looking type is an InDesign feature still unmatched by any of its competition: the Paragraph Composer. InDesign’s Paragraph Composer adjusts line breaks depending on the entire paragraph rather than just a single line at a time.  This explains why you may notice text reflowing above the line you are currently editing. Composing line endings based on the entire paragraph almost always guarantees better word spacing, hyphenation, and improved text color than a single-line composer. That said, there are still plenty of times you may need to massage text on your page due to bad breaks, white space rivers, short lines, widows, orphans, and runts. Sure, you could manually tweak Letter Spacing, Word Spacing, and other settings, one at a time—but wouldn’t it be great if you could just use some presets to “make it looser?” Or “make it a smidge tighter,” and know that a range of controls are all happening at the same time? Enter Typefitter. Typefitter works by adjusting InDesign’s built-in justification algorithms to let you nudge a whole group of settings that affect type spacing. With Typefitter, adjusting text to fit in a required space while

maintaining smooth, even spacing is easier and more effective than using tracking or scaling alone.

New Look, New Features

If you’ve used Typefitter before, the first thing you’ll notice when you start using Typefitter 5 is its new interface (Figure 1). This is not only an aesthetic change, but a technical one too, as the appearance is based off of Spectrum, Adobe’s new design system for user experiences across all its apps. For Typefitter 5, this means the Tighten and Loosen buttons have been replaced with a smooth Copyfit slider. Each step of the Copyfit slider is equivalent to a single click of Typefitter 4’s Tighten or Loosen buttons. Moving the slider to the left (negative values) tightens the paragraph’s justification settings; moving it to the right (positive values) loosens them. You can also assign a custom keyboard shortcut to control the Copyfit slider or enter a custom value directly in the Copyfit field.

The Copyfit slider defines both a maximum range of adjustments and the number of steps within that range (with the maximum limit being 100). Increasing the number of steps (using the Copyfit Slider Limit, found in Typefitter’s Preferences) changes only the increment or amount that Typefitter 5 affects your justification settings (Figure 2). To change the maximum range of adjustments that Typefitter can make to each attribute (Word Spacing, Letter Spacing, Glyph Scaling, and Tracking), enter a percentage in the Minimum and Maximum columns in Typefitter’s Preferences. Both values are relative, meaning Typefitter will decrease or increase each attribute up to the percentage you set. For example, if Word Spacing in InDesign is 1 pt, and you set the decrease/increase limits to ±10%, Typefitter can nudge the word spacing anywhere between 0.9 and 1.1 pts. The Increment values in the third column are grayed out because they are read-only. They’re calculated by dividing double the Copyfit Slider Limit value into the difference between the Minimum and Maximum values for Word Spacing, Letter Spacing, Glyph Scaling, and Tracking. New to Typefitter 5 is real-time feedback of justification settings as you adjust the Copyfit slider. To view the adjustments, click the disclosure triangle next to the Copyfit slider value. This expands the panel to reveal the precise amount of adjustment made to the paragraph’s Justification settings as you move the Copyfit slider (Figure 3). I love having this level of detailed information easily accessible.

Highlighting Changes

Speaking of real-time feedback, one of my wishlist items in my initial review of Typefitter was a highlight option to see which paragraphs Typefitter had tightened or loosened. The plug-in did eventually get this ability in subsequent versions, but Typefitter 5 takes it to a whole new level. In the Typefitter menu, you’ll find the Highlight Copyfit Text option, which you can now trigger by a keyboard shortcut. With this option enabled, Typefitter highlights loosened text in blue and tightened text in orange. (The fashion conscious can change the highlight colors in Typefitter’s preferences.) New to Typefitter 5 is the ability to use tints to visualize the amount of tightness or looseness applied (Figure 4). The darker the tint, the more the text has been tightened or loosened, similar to InDesign’s built-in yellow H&J Violations highlighting found in the Composition preferences.

In the Typefitter menu, you’ll also find a new Highlight White Space Rivers option. A white space river is a series of word spaces on consecutive lines of type that align to create the appearance of a crack, or “river,” in the text. Traditionally, you may have needed to squint your eyes while looking at the text or to print the page and turn it upside down to identify white space rivers.  Typefitter 5 identifies white space rivers with a purple highlight, enabling you to identify and fix them by creating new line endings (Figure 5). For example, you could tighten the tracking a tiny bit or insert a discretionary hyphen to suggest an alternate breakpoint. (This feature was inspired by Nigel French’s tip for finding white space rivers, which you can read here. But of course Typefitter’s feature makes it much simpler!) 

Setting Preferences

One final and welcome change to Typefitter 5 is the grouping of all its preferences in a single location in InDesign’s Preferences dialog box. Earlier versions had some settings in the panel menu and others in Preferences. Grouping them all together only makes sense.

Fixing Other Typographic Issues

Besides copyfitting text, Typefitter 5 can identify such other common typographical issues as widows, orphans, runts, and overset text. You can select each of these options independently in Typefitter’s preferences with greater precision than earlier versions of the plug-in. For instance, not only can you set a character amount to define what is a runt (see “A Guide to Widows, Orphans, and Runts”), you can also set a line length as a percentage, which is great for those last lines of text that still look off, even though they exceed the runt character setting (Figure 6). 

Additionally, Typefitter 5 can now find widows and orphans in numbered lists, table of contents entries, index entries, and other hierarchical content. In these situations, widows and orphans occur when an entire paragraph, instead of a single line, is by itself.

A Guide to Widows, Orphans, and Runts

Widows and orphans refer to one line of a paragraph left by itself on a page. A widow is the last line of a paragraph left by itself at the top of a page, while an orphan is the first line of a paragraph left by itself at the bottom of a page. Unless you’re working on a novel or other document where the line spacing never changes, you should take steps to avoid both widows and orphans because they break up the text’s flow and distract the reader. One way to remember the difference between them is that a widow (the last line of a paragraph left by itself at the top of a page) has a past but no future, while an orphan (the first line of a paragraph left by itself at the bottom of a page) has a future but no past. A runt is a single, short word (or word fragment) at the end of a paragraph. This lonely fellow creates a visual interruption in the flow of the text that can break the reader’s focus. It’s considered undesirable because the extra unintended white space calls more attention than necessary to the single word (Figure 7).

Use the Find button to identify any typographic issues based on your Find What preferences. Problems will be explained in the Info section of the Typefitter panel, and you use the arrows to step through each typographic issue in the list (Figure 8). You can choose to search by Document, Story, End of Story, or Selection.

More to Come

Typefitter 5 Standard is being released as a free upgrade from Typefitter 4 in conjunction with this issue of InDesign Magazine. Typefitter 5 Professional will be released later this year adding support for Profiles (the successor to Typefitter 4’s Typefit Styles), automated copyfitting, identifying Keep Options overrides, and InDesign scripting. When Typefi releases Typefitter 5 Professional, current Typefitter 4 subscribers will receive a coupon code to upgrade (free) from Typefitter 5 Standard to Typefitter 5 Professional. In terms of cost, note that at $36/year, Typefitter 5 is actually less expensive than Typefitter 4 (just over half the price!) while offering new and better features. Typefi is also offering a free trial that’s 1.5 times longer than what it offered for Typefitter 4, so you have plenty of time to kick the tires.

Should You Get It?

Since its introduction many years ago, Typefitter has been my number one plug-in for InDesign. As a typesetter for various presses throughout the country, I’m setting text all day long. For that reason, I refuse to upgrade to a new version of InDesign until Typefitter is compatible—it’s that important to my workflow.  Typefitter makes the job of massaging standard-looking text into great-looking text far easier than using InDesign’s tools alone. The updated design, added features, and reduced price of Typefitter 5 make this plug-in indispensable to anyone who works with lots of text in InDesign.

Summary

• Typefitter 5
• Typefi
• $36 USD (yearly subscription)
• Compatible with InDesign 2020 and later (macOS and Windows), in both English and Spanish
• Rating: 5 stars