Typophile

Right rag?

Lasko

Hello there.

First post around here and maybe not so interesting to you guys, but I could use some tips regarding setting text ragged right in indesign. I usually set it justified and always manage to get nice looking blocks with that, but want to leave that now and discovered that accomplishing nice looking right rags is actually more complicated than I thought.
In my settings I thought it would be a good thing to avoid as many as possible hyphens, but this of course causes an ugly right rag.
Dou you guys have ideas about reaching a nice compromise (few hyphens, nice rag)? Or is it a matter of fixing a lot of it 'by hand'.
Oh and I'm using Perpetua.

Juergen Weltin

It all depends on your column width that influences how often you need to hyphenate. I don’t matter more than three hyphens at the end of lines as long as the word breaking makes sense and does even enhance reading comfort. Which is often the case in German texts. English of course has not that many compound words. If the hyphenation is a clear one what’s so bad about it? A nice rag is always achieved by fixing it manually. In your InDesign settings you should not let the application do the paragraph composing. Nice idea though, but it never works as soon as you want to change the line break manually. And it’s not a question which typeface you use. The narrower the column the harder it is to achieve a nice rag.

Lasko

Thanks!

Andree Ljutica

Make sure you have H and J violations set to be highlighted in your setting so you can see and adjust kerning and tracking. This is a great way to look at the body of text holistically and pick apart outliers. Oh and don't use Perpetua. Shift command h is the hyphenation command.

Hrant H Papazian

Perpetua rules.

hhp

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