CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • May 29, 2012 at 7:18 am #62298
    Scott Croft

    Member

    As mentioned in my previous topics, I'm new to InDesign after years of working in Quark.

    Anyway, I'm setting some text and have come across an oddity when it comes to changing the tracking in order to squeeze some paragraphs down a bit and I wondered if anyone could shed some light on it?

    Below is a shot of the piece of work I am having the trouble with. In order to squeeze the paragraph up a bit I would like the highlighted text to all be on one line, so the 'for' moves up next to the 'lectured'. There is a good bit of space there so it shouldn't take much of a tracking change to do this.

    

    When I change the tracking to -40, as you can see below the text is being squeezed down and there is plenty of room for the 'for to move up but it stays on it's original line…

    

    With the tracking at -60, finally the 'for' moves up but so does the word following it 'almost' but this means the whole line is much more squeezed than I wanted…

    

    It seems to me that the tracking in InDesign works differently to Quark?

    I figured that it might be the case that the tracking changes that related to the word following the text selected is the space between the selected text and that which followed it. In this example, I guessed that if I selected up to the word 'lectured' and changed the tracking it would cause 'for' to move up

    However when I tested this I came across another oddity…

    As seen below (with the tracking at -40) there is now plenty of room for the word 'for' for to move up but still it stayed on it's original line.

    

    Then when I got to -60 for tracking I was amazed to find that the word 'Schools' from the line above the one I was trying to squeeze actually dropped down a line…(see below)

    

    So now I am completely stumped as to how the tracking works in Indesign? In Quark it would have worked the first way I tried, select the text I wanted to squeeze up, then change the tracking and as soon as there was room 'for' would have moved up.

    Is there a setting somewhere which is cauing this (to me) odd behaviour when I'm changing the tracking? If so what can I do about it?

    Any help very very much appreciated!

  • May 29, 2012 at 10:39 am #62300
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    The “Setting” here that appears to independently move your text around at will is the Paragraph Composer. The Paragraph Composer is designed to calculate the optimal line breaking points all over a single paragraph, taking numerous factors into account — just to mention a few: tracking, number and position of word breaks, the optimal/desired word and letter spacing as defined in Spacing, and the deviations in space size between successive lines. For left-aligned text, such as yours here, it avoids a large gap at the end immediately followed by a very small one — it evens that out as well.

    So when you think “All I have to do is move this one single word one line further to git it perfectly right”, InDesign does its calculations and notices that would make the spacing on that line visibly different from the lines before and after, and it re-calculates the entire paragraph to even things out again, leaving you to wonder what you should do to “git it right”.

    Three things will help you here.

    1. Don't think you know better than InDesign … Its spacing is “mathematically perfect”. Manual intervention on a single line will make it less than mathematically perfect, so ID will shrug, and adjust anyway.

    2. If you do want some words to stay together, use No Break to just keep those two words together — nothing more, nothing less. ID will shuffle the paragraph around until it finds a way to make it so.

    3. To gain or loose a single line in a paragraph, don't try to mess with individual “lines” (which you got cornered by). Select the entire paragraph and apply your tracking to it, in very small increments until it fits. Your suggested tracking of -20 and more makes me shiver — surely that will be visible in your output!? I never go beyond +/-10 (unless there is a real emergency going on, such as having to copy-fit a single page in between otherwise finished pages — and then I sulk the rest of the day).

    Is that all you can do? No. The power and independence of the Paragraph Composer are impressive, but if you really like to micro-manage your text, and you don't mind sub-optimal linebreaks and spacing, you can always switch back to the Single Line Composer. This, in essence, behaves exactly like paragraph filling has been doing since WordPerfect 3.0 — and Quark XPress as well –, it fills up a line until it's stuffed full, then goes on to the next one.

    For justified paragraphs I would strongly advise against the Single Line Composer (you can compare the results for yourself), but I must admit for left-aligned text you could try and see whether you can spot the quality difference between this and the Paragraph Composer.

    To find how to use the Single Line Composer, look it up in the Online Help in “Text Composition”.

  • May 30, 2012 at 1:33 am #62302
    Scott Croft

    Member

    Thanks for your reply, I did some reading up on the paragraph and singfle line composer after reading your post and I think I now understand exactly what was going on and it makes much more sense now. Having come from a version of quark which was about 12 years old, it's clear that things have changed hugely in the world of text setting and design etc since that software was made.

    I have to say, having had a bit of a play with chunks of text, the paragraph composer does indeed do a good job but it is also useful to know that in times when I have to really squeeze to get text to fit into a space I can still have the fine and total control over it using the single line composer.

    With regard to the amounts of tracking I use, well I tend to use as little as possible, the examples I posted yesterday were just extremes to show how much space there was for a single word to fit into without it deciding to move.

    Having done this job for as many years as I have, I have a pretty good eye for where I can give a line a bit of a squeeze to get something to fit or not, and I just new that the 'for' should easily be able to fit in the gap I wanted it to move to. When I gave it a try with the single line composer I was right and it only took a -5 tracking to get it to do so.

    I have to say I'm really enjoying using InDesign, despite it being so much more complicated in places than the software I've been using for years, it is lovely to work with and some of the features are just hugely useful – smart guides for example is a complete god send!!!

  • May 30, 2012 at 2:19 am #62303
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Having come from a version of quark which was about 12 years old, it's clear that things have changed hugely in the world of text setting and design etc since that software was made.

    Actually, it's quite the contrary!

    Donald Knuth programmed Optimized Paragraph Justification into TeX in 1978, and it took Adobe 21 years (1999) to realize that idea wasn't really half bad … So it's the other way around: all other typesetting and viewing software that uses a plain straightforward justification algorithm since 1978 is lagging hopelessly behind what is actually possible.

    (And that includes, for example, iBooks on the iPad, which does not only justifies text horribly but even manages to hyphenate “ye-ars” and “gre-ater” — another problem that Knuth tackled with success in the late '70s.)

    (Edit: oh okay, he didn't tackle it fully on its own. Look up “Knuth-Liang hyphenation” if it interests you. ;) )

• Author
  Posts