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• • April 20, 2011 at 9:36 am #59347
    Sarah H

    Member

    I am trying for the first time to use InDesign's cross-reference feature to handle page number references throughout my book. So, in case a page in Chapter 3 reflows, the reference to that page that appears in Chapter 11 will automatically update. That part seems to work, however something weird is happening to the paragraph formatting. The line where the page number cross-reference appears is getting really squished. It's like it's not recognizing how wide the page number is (mine is 3+ characters, like 11–12 in the screenshot below) or it's oblivious to the justification settings or something. Any ideas?

    

  • April 20, 2011 at 3:35 pm #59358
    Alan Gilbertson

    Participant

    That's coming from InDesign's justification engine. It's very tricky justifying text in such a narrow column, regardless of auto-inserted items such as page references, but there are some paragraph style settings that can help.

    You could turn off justification completely and allow the text to rag right, but if that's not an option you can improve matters by adjusting the Justification settings in your text paragraph style:

    In the Justification dialog, try setting Letter Spacing to minimum -3% and maximum 3%, and Glyph Scaling to minimum 99% (or even 98%) and maximum 101-102%. You can set the Word Spacing minimum to 90%. These will allow InDesign's paragraph composer more freedom to create a more even text color than the defaults, but you may still have to do some copy editing to avoid super-compressed or super-spaced lines of text. The Paragraph Composer and Single-Line Composer will do their best to stick with the limits you've allowed them, but on occasion will override them where a word just can't be hyphenated. Those overrides will show up with a yellow highlight in Normal view if you've enabled “H&J Violations” in Edit>Preferences>Composition.

    You can also use custom tracking, turn off the Paragraph Composer, insert manual line breaks and use No Break or soft hyphens to tweak the text.

    As a general rule, it's best to go ahead and get all your text set before you make your “fine tuning” pass to tweak the typography, and it's best done from front to back, because any adjustments you make will affect the text that follows.

  • April 21, 2011 at 4:13 am #59365
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I noticed that it treats it as a single block of numbers, I had something similar with something like see page 11-15. Where there was plenty of room on the line for 11-15 it pushed it to the next line. Manually typing in 11-15 it fitted just fine, and a word or two after the reference. Inserting the reference again pushed the text onto the next line.

    Something weird definitley happens with Cross-References in the way they are treated in lines of text.

  • April 21, 2011 at 8:41 am #59368
    Sarah H

    Member

    @Alan, yes, I've fiddled with the justification settings quite a bit. This seems to be an anomaly that is not adhering to the specified settings.

    @Eugene, glad it's not just me. It's weird.

    Anyone else have a magic fix for this? It's a real shame because it makes the cross-reference function useless to me. To have to go back and manually tweak each occurrence completely defeats the purpose of automating.

  • April 21, 2011 at 1:02 pm #59371
    Nenad Marinkovic

    Member

    Same problem here!

    @sarahchager

    I know that this has nothing to do with your question but how did you insert image in your post above from hard-drive

  • April 22, 2011 at 12:22 pm #59393
    Sarah H

    Member

    @shone1505, I uploaded my image to photobucket first. I see from your other post, you figured it out.

  • April 22, 2011 at 3:36 pm #59394
    Alan Gilbertson

    Participant

    Hi Sarah,

    You're running into a somewhat-unavoidable quirk of automatically inserted variables in InDesign. What's in the flow of text is a code, and InDesign doesn't properly account for the expansion of the code into a piece of text. The code is a single character, and it behaves in some ways as a single character, no matter what the expanded text value of the variable is. As here, this can have unwanted formatting side-effects.

    The solution, at least for now, is to use forced line breaks, “No Break” and soft hyphens in the surrounding text to bring things back to a reasonable appearnance. Sometimes you just have to type stuff by hand once the copy editing is final. To give you an example, a book I designed last year had an extensive glossary with Chinese characters appearing in certain entries. I used text variables to put the first and last definitions on each page as part of the page header, dictionary-style, which worked fine for the English-only entries. Because the text variable is in reality a single code, it can't have multiple fonts or styles, and unfortunately the font for the Chinese characters in the book was not the one I used for the main text, which was in English. Where an entry word showed up in the header, I had no choice but to delete the text variable and manually type that part of the header.

    A similar thing to what you're seeing can happen where an automatic chapter title is part of the header. If the title happens to be longer than will fit in the frame, it won't overflow (because it's really only one character), but the expanded text won't fit, so InDesign squashes the text until it does. The solutions here are to expand the text frame or use a different chapter title.

    More intelligent handling of inserted text variables is a great subject for a feature request! Add your voice to the clamor here at the Adobe website.

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