Reply To: Align to grid and justification

Hi Johanna,

I often deal with typesetting on large books (up to and including a grotesquely large Bible Dictionary I specced out), so I’m familiar with this problem. The first thing I’d recommend is based on your picture: It looks like your baseline grid is set to start at the top of the page. Have you tried setting it to start at the top margin? This makes baseline grid use much easier.

Honestly, I’ve run into so many problems with vertical justification that I avoid it at all costs. Here’s what I’d recommend instead:

* Set every text style to align to grid (or the parent text style, assuming you’re basing your styles NOT on the [default paragraph] style).
* Any style you would like to NOT align to the grid should be individually set to break the above rule.
* Any style you need to shift up or down can be modified using the Advanced Character Formats > Baseline shift. I usually raise this by a few points to set off text from the grid. This works for character styles or specific overrides as well.
* To make sure all styles obey the rules, try to keep your margins set so that your baseline grid aligns perfectly with the text frame size. I have a spreadsheet of math I use to do all this calculation (I’m terrible at doing it in my head)

For example, my publishing house prefers a nice airy 15 pt leading. In a 6×9 inch book, that means 432×648 pt page size, which divided by 15 is a line count of 43.2. Not great for justification. To fix this, I set the top margin and bottom margin to create a text block evenly divisible by 15, which in my case resulted in some weird margin sizes in *inches* but great margin sizes in *points*. (I hate imperial units. Go metric!)