InReview: V-Justify

Keith Gilbert

This article appeared in Issue 144 of InDesign Magazine.

This solution from ID-Extras vastly improves on InDesign’s built-in vertical justification features.

In a perfect world, everyone would design pages using a baseline grid, and clients would allow us to design heads, subheads, body text, pull quotes, and all the other bits and pieces of a layout so that they align to that grid. In this scenario, everything would line up evenly between columns—and the text would “bottom out” perfectly, reaching to the last baseline on every page.

But in the real world, things aren’t that easy. Art directors or clients often want a little more space before headings, or a bit of extra space before and after a list, or other little tweaks that violate the strict baseline grid. And yet they’ll still demand the text line up evenly at both the top and bottom of each page or column! The only solution is to “cheat” a bit with the settings for space before and after paragraphs. This is the exact scenario that V-Justify from Id-Extras is designed to address.

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