Span columns and vertical justification

[Andrew Brown]

Working on an edition of letters where the notes follow directly after each letter in the same text flow and where letters can be two lines or ten pages long, I tried spanning the letters across two columns and leaving the notes in two columns.

It works, but the result is unpublishable since the same pagination rules apply to single and double columns, causing huge increases in leading, particularly in the notes. Adding blank lines at the end of the notes can help, but not always, and is not really an option.

Am I missing something? Knowing Adobe, probably not.

Apart from this problem, is there any way of limiting vertical justification in single-column work to particular points, for example allowing the space to vary above headings of a certain sort while forbidding changes in leading?

AB

[William Adams]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 6:22 AM, Andrew Brown <li...@c18.net> wrote:

Working on an edition of letters where the notes follow directly after each letter in the same text flow and where letters can be two lines or ten pages long, I tried spanning the letters across two columns and leaving the notes in two columns.

It works, but the result is unpublishable since the same pagination rules apply to single and double columns, causing huge increases in leading, particularly in the notes. Adding blank lines at the end of the notes can help, but not always, and is not really an option.

 ...

Apart from this problem, is there any way of limiting vertical justification in single-column work to particular points, for example allowing the space to vary above headings of a certain sort while forbidding changes in leading?

 

Use a script to add vertical justification only where there is vertical spacing (you can do an 800 pg. book in a single night by hand if you need to --- ask me how I know that and I'll cry into a beer). If you also only use paragraph and character styles you can remove it and redo it from a particular section of text by selecting it, right-clicking and "clearing over-rides". For multi-column work you'll also want scripts to break multi-column text frames into sets of single column ones and stitch them back together. Let me know if you want them.

The annoying thing of course, is there was a nifty free plug-in for properly doing vertical justification in Quark Xpress.

Or, of course, one could just use TeX, which is what I'm glad to've pretty much gone back to.

William

[Brad Walrod]

Well, you can change the Paragraph Spacing Limit in the Text Frame Options dialog box (or in an Object Style) to a really large number, which will prevent leading adjustments. But it’ll still add space above all paragraphs.

In-Tools’ ProperVJ might be worth a look for you.

Brad