Reply To: Aligning baselines between columns

Hello Anne-Marie,
As in ID, all these programs used text boxes and one could define vertical justification for each one or for all.
But here stops the similarity to ID. For some weird reason those who wrote IDs code linked/forced vertical justification with several other parameters, like, for instance orphans and widows (keep options – which is the major offender) and some even weirder image boxes “attraction-repulsion” feature (like if a box would have its “own life” irregularly attracting or repelling texts around when one applies text wrap to them). As far as I could diagnose this, all is related to a concept that Dwayne mentioned. All text paragraphs have to obey certain rules of spacing/leading multiples for baseline grid to work. It just happens that this is almost impossible in a complex layout, as I mentioned previously. On the other hand the 3 programs mentioned did not imposed such limitations. Vertical justification could be nicely fit by playing with leading, tracking, kerning and of course with fractional type sizes and paragraph spacing overrides in text box.
And believe it or not, Ventura Publisher, the first DTP for PCs (PageMaker came later) was a very powerful and well designed program. It did not have all IDs bells and whistles, but it performed magnificently even with complex layouts. One of its best features was anchoring images or boxes to text. As text changed and flowed, it would push up or down the linked object, but when it did not fit on the same pages, it would push it to the top of the next (or previous) page and place a mark on it, calling the user attention. Re-anchoring was a breeze, all one needed to do was to drag the image or box to a new position.
Since this does not works well in ID, my trick is to flow first all the text of a chapter or document, then layout page by page, without using anchors, making sure that everything on page 1 looks right. Then I proceed to the next, and so on. Even so, when it comes to vertical justification of two or more columns documents, it is a nightmare in ID.
A nostalgic note :-) Ventura Publishes did not run under Windows (Windows would be invented 1 or 2 years later), rather created inside a DOS’ characters-only environment a graphical one. Don’t ask me how they did it, but there was a Xerox “Windows” that run Ventura Publisher. In other words an emulation of a graphical environment.