I’m a little confused. In the example, there doesn’t seem to a full blank line between paragraphs, only extra space. In these cases, for lines to line up across columns, the space after paragraph has to equal the leading or a whole number times the leading. / Make sure your Align to Baseline Grid button (in the Paragraph panel or Control panel) is pressed. / By the way, in your example, I would go with no extra spacing and an indented first line (indentation equal to body size). This makes it clear to the reader that he’s looking at a coherent text, not a collection of excerpts, and it makes sure that the reader is never in doubt whether or not there is paragraph break hidden in a given column or page break coinciding with a period.

I’m a little confused. In the example, there doesn’t seem to a full blank line between paragraphs, only extra space. In these cases, for lines to line up across columns, the space after paragraph has to equal the leading or a whole number times the leading.

I had been reading that one should make the gap between the paragraph breaks 60-80% smaller then you would get from a double hard return, hence the smaller gaps. Is this wrong? I am using 10pt type with 12 pt leading, so I was decreasing the paragraph break to about 9.5 pt. Should I keep them at 12 pt?

p@rick

Personally, I normally use a full return to separate paragraphs in block style writing.
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Nancy Foster
Fontzilla’s Alter Ego http://www.fontzilla.org

No, you’re right, when you use spaces between paragraphs, they should be small enough that they can’t be confused with blank lines. I would say 8 points in your case. Trouble is, with good looking paragraph spaces like these, you have to sacrifice aligning across columns. To me, this is just another good reason to abandon the whole space between paragraphs idea altogether and stick to the good old indent. Elegant, robust, working.

Another option, if you prefer the look of space between paragraphs, is to use a blank line of half the leading. (Personally, I’d probably set it up as Space Before, rather than a hard return). You can also then set your Baseline Grid to half the leading to facilitate layout.

By using exactly half the leading, you’ll get a fairly pleasing syncopation between your columns: lines will either be exactly aligned or a half beat off, coming in and out of alignment in a regular rhythm with each paragraph.

This can be an acceptable scheme in some layouts. You won’t be able to count on aligning the bottoms of all columns, so it works best with a looser, less formal page design.

I had been reading that one should make the gap between the paragraph breaks 60-80% smaller then you would get from a double hard return, hence the smaller gaps. Is this wrong?

That’s great advice if there’s only one column of text to deal with, but it fails to work when one wants to keep multiple columns aligned. It really comes down to what degree of order you want in your layouts.

Kent’s half line space is what I would use on multi-column work.

The hyphens seem surprisingly high, almost on the x-height, I normally try to avoid hyphenation in a document, however, if you can’t avoid using them, have a look at the hyphenation options, my feeling is that you should avoid hyphenating any proper nouns, some words have broken awkwardly – Appren-tice for example.

Tim

Thanks for all the wonderful responses!

p@rick

The half line space solution is quite clever, I will have to try it for my next text formatting job.

On a side note. Patric you may consider revising your signature. I instinctively ignore the @ and it turns into... well you get the idea. Perhaps you might consider altering it to read “P @ Trick” or something. Unless that’s how it was intended :)