No hyphenation?

Hi Sarah,

Setting justified type can be very challenging as you're learning with this exercise. When done with care and precision, the blocks of text can create an elegant, even gray color.

The first thing I noticed was that your text lacks a single hyphen. Have you set up paragraph styles for your text? If not, you should do so because adjustments to the type will be simpler going forward. If you have, go into your paragraph style and turn on hyphenation. Next, you will need to adjust the rules for hyphenation and justification. Everyone has their preferences and what you select depends a great deal on they typeface with which you are working. The goal is to achieve the most even word and character spacing as possible. Large gaps in word spacing slow the eye.

Below is a sample set of H&J rules. What you select depends a great deal on the character of typeface you're setting as well as the proportions of the page (margins, body width, etc.)

Hyphenation
Words with at least: 6 letters
After First: 3 letters (min. # of letters allowed to break at end of line)
Before Last: 3 letters (min. # of letters allowed to break to next line)
Hyphen Limit: 2 hyphens (number of consecutive hyphens allowed)
Hyphenation Zone: (Make adjustments with preview on and see how changes affect spacing)
Hyphenate Capitalized Words: Uncheck
Hyphenate Last Word: Uncheck
Hyphenate Across Column: Uncheck

Justification
You'll get more opinions about proper justification settings than you will about hyphenation.

Word Spacing: The default is a bit extreme, in my opinion. Better sets of numbers tend to be much closer in range. (Min: 90%, Desired: 98%, Max: 105%). Remember, the ideal is to have all word spaces match completely, so the wider the range here, the more you are allowing word spaces to differ.

Letter Spacing: Be cautious when adjusting letter spacing. There's a reason the default is 0. I'd only alter this by 1% in any given direction, if at all. Sometimes, you want to globally adjust the tracking of the entire text. You could set your desired letter spacing to -1%, for example. But a better way to do this would be to just set the tracking to a specific point size.

Glyph scaling can be contentious. Some folks will tell you to never scale glyphs to any degree. Others, for the sake of achieving even word spacing, will allow glyphs to scale down to, say, 98% and up to maybe 102%.

Do you have Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style"? It's a must for designers and typographers.

Thank you ever so much, you've wrote that in a way which i can understand, the text look perfect now. I don't have The Elements of Typographic Style, i will get it though, The books my lecturers seems to tell me to get don't really help, as i was told type and typography by John Baines wasn;t really helpful.

Btw an non justified question, but doe anyone know if you should start a new line when someone talks, cos i have bought one of the original copies of alice in wonderland and it doesn't.

Widows & orphans’ll need attention too, looking at that spread.
Dunno about anyone else, but I’d work with invisibles showing (sorry, don’t know what term InDy uses for them): there definitely seems to be something extra in front of “fell very slowly” on that RH page - who knows, it might be a manual line break...

> Word Spacing: The default is a bit extreme, in my opinion. Better sets of numbers tend to be much closer in range. (Min: 90%, Desired: 98%, Max: 105%)

This is misleading, I think. The “better sets of numbers” statement really depends upon the application and justification engine being used.

The truth of the matter is that the setting for Maximum word spacing will not limit the maximum allowable word spacing.

First, the three sets of numbers are utilized internally by the justification algorithm to assess penalties for the various possibilities of any given line (or sets of lines, if multi-line calculations are being done).

Second, the Max setting is how wide a word space must become before the engine will then apply any additional letter spacing.

But at the end of the entire process, if the engine is unable to come up with a satisfactory setting for a given line, then it will give up and throw all the extra space into the word spaces to justify the line. So it is entirely possible (maybe even likely) to wind up with instances of wide word spacing even if you set Max to something very constrained like 105%.

In InDesign, with the multi-line composer enabled, you are actually better off giving the engine as much latitude as is actually acceptable. If you really cannot abide any space tighter than 90%, then by all means, set your Min to 90%. But if you would accept 80% in the most difficult situations in order to solve a problem, then you are better off setting the Min to 80%, so that the algorithm has all the potential it can get to work with. The InDesign algorith will only use that 80% if it really must (i.e., it has a higher penalty) in order to get the best overall setting.

Of course, if the Max setting is limited too severely, then the algorithm will probably have to resort to the tighter setting more often.

Limiting the Min too conservatively just ties the algorithms hands, and limiting the Max doesn’t really have the desired affect of limiting the widest word spaces.

In Quark, on the other hand, the engine is a single-line composer. In this case, Quark will tend to use the tightest spacing allowed more frequently to fit a line. So, here, you may be better off holding back a little on your Min and leaving some room to solve any especially intractable problems manually. (The same holds for the Min letter spacing.)

In Quark, too, the Max setting will only determine how wide a space before resorting to letter spacing, after which it will just throw any leftover space into word spaces anyway, if it can’t find a better way.

With InDesign’s multi-line composer, any problem areas will be distributed as best it can. In Quark, what you’ll find is that the lines at the beginning of a paragraph are better fitted and hew closer to the desired settings; but as Quark runs out of good possibilities, you’ll end up with a preponderance of loose lines toward the end of a paragraph.

The actual numbers to use may well depend upon the width of the nominal word space in the font being used.

For many contemporary digital fonts, the word space is on the order of 250 units, which equates to a quarter of an em. This is often cited in typography manuals as a good general space value. Those same manuals will cite a fifth of an em as a good minimum. This would then equate to 80% of a 250-unit nominal word space. That’s where Adobe's default comes from. I disagree with Roy (seventy7); I think this is generally a fine Min setting.

However, there are plenty of fonts with smaller nominal word spaces, where the default settings may indeed yield results too tight (or not: it really depends on how well suited the nominal word space is to the design of the typeface — as well as the typographer’s tastes and the particular text setting).

And there are plenty of fonts (generally older Monotype faces, I’ve found), where the nominal word space value is excessive, on the order of 278 units, where one might want a Min of closer to 70% and an Optimal of 90% or so.

At the end of the day, there is no hard and fast solution. One must learn the ins and outs, how justification (and hyphenation) works, and train one’s eyes to gauge the results.

Sorry for the lengthy sermon.

Sarah, listen to Kent on this. He knows much more about these things than I do. Excellent explanation, Kent. Thanks for providing the detail I wasn't able to explain.

If I can add a personal (and completely amateurish) touch to Kent's excellent explanation: paragraph and single lines justification and word spacing also depends on the specific type you're using. Usually, I set texts in books with the default ID settings, then I manually adjust every single paragraph - or single text lines within a paragraph - whenever I find them looking weird (disharmonic). How do I do that? It depends. Maybe a different hypenation is needed, or a line must break with a different word. But, althought ID is an excellent program, you can't completely depend on how the software sets the page for you. And looking at the pages printed also helps you finding what's wrong with them.

It has been said before, but I'll say it again. Setting justified always involves compromises. Unless you can rewrite the text, you will have to accept this.

To set the spaceband values: Start by setting ragged right. In the Justification portion of the paragraph style, set the "ideal" value to 100 (percent) Then go down in 2 percent increments -- 100, 98, 96, 94, 92, 90. Print each out as you make the change, and write the value you used on the back of the paper. One of them will look better -- the wordspacing will fit well with the character spacing, and it will not be a chore to determine word boundaries. Do not try to judge from the screen. Print out a page worth of each setting.

That will eventually become you "ideal" value. While still in the ragged mode, change the center "Ideal" value the same way, starting with 80, then going down, 78, 76, 74, etc. When it becomes a chore -- not hard, but a chore WHILE READING -- to determine the word boundaries, you have your "minimum" value. Set the maximum value to whatever you want -- it doesn't affect much, because you're going to set the tracking and scaling values to something like 0.5% Why so small? Because eventually, you're going to have to make/save a line to make up a page, and they will come in handy for that. I like to save tracking and scaling to use by hand.

When you start setting the type justified with the values you've just determined, you might find that you want to go down a percent or so for the ideal value. Things sometimes work out that way. For a ragged setting, use what you determined to be "perfect."

I set the minimum number of letters before hyphenation to two. The hyphen makes up the third character. This lets words like "become", because", etc, hyphenate. The minimum for letters taken down should be three -- though people who follow Dowding should note he'll take down only two letters if that is the only way to avoid a loose line. Since this is a final project with, I suppose, a grade, you might try and find out what your professor feels the correct numbers are. Every rule that prohibits the breaking of a line -- don't do this, don't do that -- comes directly out of the evenness of the word spacing. Where else could it come from?

Remember, no widows. Some say no orphans. At least two lines of an extract at the head or foot of a page. At least two lines of text before or after a subhead at the head or foot of a page. Some say 3 lines. It can be done, but you wind up running more pages shorter or longer. It's all compromise, all the rules do is constrain you.

Edit: By the way. Why is your running head closer to the trim that to the text? What does it belong to? I'd say it belongs to the text, so it should be closer. As a starting point, I'd keep the number of text lines the same, but move the text block up, closer to the RH. This will also give you a larger foot margin, which is traditional. Etc. Take a gander at some award-winning books -- not picture books, but books with mainly text. That would be a good a starting point.