Now I wonder if anyone could shed some light on the following:
At a newspaper, layouts are made on a daily basis. Stories will not be as long the one day as they were the other. So they have a ‘budget’. How much space to write in, or place pictures, it’s all pretty much pre determined and they have the daily puzzle that needs to fit together. I wonder how they do it.
Now here’s my case: my organisation is putting out a handful of leaflets, all with the same template, but with different stories. Text is all aligned nicely to a basline grid. Space is scarce on these things and I would like to avoid getting docs from my colleagues that either result in overset text or not filling the page out nicely. I want to present them an ideal character budget.
I’m trying to figure out the ideal way to calculate this. Some things make it difficult:
-text is justified, meaning space between words is not consistent. I can not calculate a space as being as wide as a character.
-a heading style ignores the baseline grid, so this heading budget influences the body text budget in odd ways.
-one heading style works great on one line, but on two lines, it creates a sort of space after (or rather a space before for the body paragraph).
So is there a good way to come up with a budget, or do even newspapers in fact have to do with the cumbersome process of editing minor parts of text to get the snug fit on everything?
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