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• • March 3, 2019 at 3:35 pm #114720
    Joanna Connolly

    Member

    Hi everyone

    I’m interested to hear your opinion on the use of soft returns within a paragraph to manage left-aligned text across columns.

    With the range of options available in InDesign I would have expected formatting tools to be utilised rather than inserting multiple line breaks in each paragraph.

    Is this something a beginner InDesign user would do, or is it common practice?

    Let me know what you think.

    Cheers
    Joanna

  • March 20, 2019 at 5:19 am #115452
    Jeremy Howard

    Participant

    This is definitely something that a beginner in InDesign would do, you’re much better off to learn how to utilize the tools that manage how/where text breaks in a paragraph rather than entering soft returns for line breaks.

    Consider a situation where you have gone down through a paragraph, adding soft returns to manage line breaks and then you need to make some sort of change to your font (kerning, tracking, font size, typeface, etc…) What you would almost certainly be left with is a block of text that has line breaks in very odd places and you would be forced to go back through all of your text in order to sort it out. That would be a serious bummer.

  • April 5, 2019 at 11:30 am #115822
    Brett Stone

    Participant

    Ditto Jeremy.
    It’s a real case of ‘yes, it’s possible to do this. But should you?”
    Adding to Jeremy, if your content is ever repurposed for use in ePub or other digital distribution, those soft returns and manual hyphens will all be problems.

    Related topics worth learning:
    * Hyphenation and Justification settings for paragraphs
    * Discretionary hyphens, and using them before a word to prevent hyphenation
    * Column and Page breaks
    * No Break command

    Are there still times that might just benefit from a soft return? Yes, but they can be rare, and imho should only be applied as close to the end of project as possible, to prevent them from creeping in to places you don’t want them.

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