Balance Ragged Lines is applied in the Indents and Spacing dialog of Paragraph Style Options, or locally from the Control panel menu. Balance Ragged Lines is useful for heads and subheads and reduces the amount of manual intervention necessary to achieve lines of more equal length.
If the lines of your type are not breaking as expected, it could be because Balance Ragged Lines has been applied.
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When using justified text the size of the word spaces will necessarily flex in order to achieve a smooth right edge to the text frame. It is important that the word spaces are not too big nor too small, and are as consistent as possible.
Show Bad Word Spacing allows the user to more easily identify word spacing problems and fix them accordingly by adjusting the Justification and Hyphenation settings of the relevant Paragraph Styles.
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Highlighting any forced line breaks in the text makes it easier to troubleshoot text flow problems.
A soft return (Shift+Return/Enter), also known as forced line break, carries the text to the right of the cursor down to the next line without starting a new paragraph. This prevents the text from taking on any unwanted indent and spacing attributes of the original paragraph.
Soft returns are also used for contouring paragraphs of ragged text and to break lines for sense, especially in headlines and subheads. If the text reflows, soft returns can leave unwanted breaks in the middle of a line.
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Allowing text to hyphenate makes it easier to achieve an even type density, or good “type color.”
If you choose to hyphenate text, finding just the right amount of hyphenation can be a challenge. You want enough hyphenation to prevent bad word spacing (justified text), or uneven line lengths (ragged text), but not so many hyphens that comprehension is compromised.
Show/Hide Hyphens makes it easier for the user to evaluate a document’s hyphenation and — f necessary — adjust the hyphenation settings for a particular Paragraph Style(s). Hyphenation exceptions can also be made to fix problems on a case by case basis with discretionary hyphens, or by adding No Breaks. If appropriate, rewording the content may also fix the issue.
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In addition to proper nouns and product names, No Break can also be used for the following:
A No Break can be applied to a selected range of text locally, or as a Character Style. No Breaks can also be applied as a GREP Style.
To troubleshoot text flow problems, it can be helpful to view where No Breaks have been applied.
The Show/Hide No Break tool toggles highlighting to show No Break formatting. The highlights do not print.
Widows and orphans are text composition problems common in continuous prose.
Specifically…
A widow is the last line of a paragraph, stranded at the top of a column or page.
An orphan is the first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a column or page.
Once identified, the user can choose to fix these issues with Keep Options, tracking, and/or rewriting.
Note: Short last lines of a paragraph (or runts) are sometimes mistakenly referred to as widows. While related to widows and orphans, these are a different issue. To prevent short last lines apply a No Break to the last 8-10 characters of body text paragraphs by means of a GREP Style. (see Show / Hide No Breaks).
