Indesign alignment

[Lucas Morato]

Hey guys,

I'm currently facing problems with text alignment in my indesign. It liberally does not line up correctly at the bottom of the text.
I've looked for several solutions about this so far I didn't get an answer.

Could someone give me a help?

https://prnt.sc/I_1ymjv7_8Wg

[da...@radiqx.com]

It is almost certain that the leading is set on Auto, and that there is a character with a different leading in the central column. It could even be a Return, or an invisible character.

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[Ann Farr]

Using a Baseline Grid (set to the leading of your text) is really helpful I find.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indesign-talk/A6D586E9-F71F-4442-9C3C-9E78D1D8E413%40radiqx.com.

[Dick Margulis]

First of all, what's going on above that point on the page? Are there
subheadings, for example? If you have a heading style that is defined
with space above and space below, you can run into that situation if
there's a heading at the top of a column. There are a few ways to
correct that, depending on how you've elected to align type.

Second, have you checked that the basic paragraph style is applied
consistently to all of the text, as opposed to having a + on the
paragraph style somewhere in that middle column?

Side note: I see that in the first column, there is no paragraph indent
on the penultimate line. Is that intentional? I hope not. It's a style
I've seen in some European publications, but it always looks like an
error to me, and I hope, perhaps foolishly, that designers will
reconsider it. It does not serve either the author or the reader, even
if it makes the designer feel smugly au courant.

> --

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[Lucas Morato]

I'm even downloading another version of indesign thinking there's a bug with it.

Here's the whole ad: https://prnt.sc/3qv-7xOFHZi4

[Lucas Morato]

Setting the entire text do baseline grid leading dindt worked....

[Dick Margulis]

Look at the subheading in column 2. It does not take up exactly two
lines of text in height. Adjust the space above to force a line to
column 3, and you'll be all set.

On 7/25/2023 10:30 AM, Lucas Morato wrote:
> I'm even downloading another version of indesign thinking there's a
> bug with it.
>
> Here's the whole ad: https://prnt.sc/3qv-7xOFHZi4

[brad kenozatype.com]

The second column subhead's leading and any spacing before and after don't add up to an even multiple of the surrounding text's leading. You'll need to adjust it so that it does for those bottom lines to align.

---

From: indesi...@googlegroups.com <indesi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Lucas Morato <lmo...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2023 10:30 AM
To: InDesign talk <indesi...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [ID] Indesign alignment

 

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[Lucas Morato]

I managed to find out. The alignment of the title and subtitle was causing the entire text to be misaligned. Also Leading from a title in blue down there and leading in general were also causing misalignment.

This program shouldn't work that way. It should have a way of self-alignment without having to correct everything "on the eye".

[R Evans]

You might have spacing between like paragraphs in a paragraph style. It adds space only between paragraphs using the same par style. I had to check for that awhile back when I was working with older reprints. I think it had something to do with opening an old file in a newer version of InDesign.

It could be the text frames if they are set to justify, center, or bottom align the text.

I suggest making your baseline grid visible, set the grid spacing to the text ledding and to begin so that the first line in each frame sits on a baseline. This will let you look at each line to see where they get mis-aligned to the baseline grid.

Rebecca

On Jul 25, 2023, at 8:04 AM, Lucas Morato <lmo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey guys,

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[Dick Margulis]

On 7/25/2023 11:24 AM, Lucas Morato wrote:
> This program shouldn't work that way. It should have a way of
> self-alignment without having to correct everything "on the eye".

InDesign does not require you to align anything by the eye. It aligns
things by the numbers, with extreme precision. If you are the kind of
designer who failed basic arithmetic in school and never looks at
anything with a number in it, then perhaps typesetting is not the right
career for you. You have to do some arithmetic once in  a while, either
when you are specifying your paragraph styles or when, having failed to
do that correctly, you have to make adjustments in the layout. But do
not blame the tool. This is pure user error.

[R Evans]

Back in the 80s and 90s I used Ventura Publisher, which let you specify different percentages of linespacing above and below paragraph styles, such as subheads and extracts (and also between lines of text if you wanted that). This allowed pages to automatically bottom align. To use VP’s vertical justification successfully, however, you could not activate it at first. You needed to see where text broke across pages, then shorten or lengthen the number of lines on facing pages so that they were no more than 1 line different. After doing that, you could turn on vertical justification at your last pass.

InDesign lets you set text frames to vertically justify, which adds micro-spacing between every line (if I understand it correctly) so that the last baseline sits on the bottom of the frame. You need to be very systematic with this or it will cause more problems than it’s worth. There is no visible difference between text frames with different alignment settings. If your text reflowed, you could end up with a mess because of text frames set to vertically justify. For instance, a page that should have 38 body text lines on it but ends up with only 32 because a subhead bumped to the next page, would look awful with that much space added between body text lines by vertical justification.

If you decide to use InDesign’s vertical justification frames, make sure you create an object style for it and apply that style to frames you want to justify vertically. Using an object style will let you temporarily add a fill color or an outline to those frames so you can see where they are and whether anything has gone wrong.

Hope this helps,

Rebecca

[David Blatner]

Rebecca,

There is a third-party tool called V-Justify that works similarly to what you describe, I think:

https://www.id-extras.com/products/vertical-justification/

--david blatner

(remember indesignsecrets? it's creativepro.com now!) :-)

[R Evans]

Cool beans, thanks David!

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[Olav Martin Kvern]

re: " InDesign lets you set text frames to vertically justify, which adds micro-spacing between every line (if I understand it correctly)..."

That's not quite correct. Ordinarily, InDesign adds space between paragraphs up to the threshold you define  in the Paragraph Spacing Limit field. When that point is reached, InDesign will adjust the leading of individual lines. You can prevent InDesign from applying spacing between every line by entering a large value in this field (enter 8640 to keep it from changing leading at all)--or, if you *want* InDesign to adjust leading between lines, enter 0.

That said, it's best to design/typeset to a leading grid, which specifies every bit of leading, paragraph spacing, and text frame height in increments of the grid. That way, you avoid having mismatched baselines--a hallmark gaffe of amateur page layout.

Thanks,

Ole

On Tuesday, July 25, 2023 at 4:16:51 PM UTC-7 R Evans wrote:

[Lucas Morato]

lol, why  doesnt  indesign have this feature?

[Olav Martin Kvern]

re: lol, why doesnt indesign have this feature"

We've already explained that it does, and how to use it.

It does not do this by default, because that would be a terrible feature in a professional typesetting program.

Thanks,

Ole

[R Evans]

Sort of but not quite. I found the Paragraph Spacing Limit Field—which I had never paid attention to—and have been experimenting. The maximum I can enter in that field is 720p, which does prevent adding space between lines within a paragraph but does not prevent adding space between body text paragraphs, which I don’t want ... unless I’m missing something, which is entirely possible. 

David’s suggestion about V-justify is quite intriguing. I typeset books, though, so my clients would also need to own the software so they could make small changes before sending a book to press or before reprinting.

What would be perfect would be if V-justify could transfer the new spacing to the paragraphs as local formatting. That would let me use V-justify to easily compose the pages, then lock it in place (in a sense) for the client.

Rebecca

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[Olav Martin Kvern]

re: " The maximum I can enter in that field is 720p"

When I wrote "8640" I should have been clearer--that's in points. 720 picas = 8640 points.

Again: a leading grid is the way to go. Once you have it set up, it makes everything much easier. Yes, it involves arithmetic, but there is no escape from addition and subtraction in typesetting.:-)

Thanks,

Ole

[Dick Margulis]

What is needed is a vertical spaceband that works the same as a horizontal spaceband. Build it into a heading style, say two above and one below for an A head, two above and zero below for a B head, one above and zero below for a C head. (Or whatever distribution works for a given book. Now when you select vertical justification, you don't card the body text lines. Instead, only the space above and below the heads gets adjusted, in proportion to the number of spacebands.

It's not hard to conceptualize, and it shouldn't be all that hard to implement.

[brad kenozatype.com]

While I like the proportional spacing method you suggest, V-Justify does work well with plugging in Max and Min spacing adjustments (in points) based on what's selected in a list of existing paragraph styles.

Proper VJ did proportionally distribute spacing above paragraphs in a frame that already had space before values, but I'm not entirely sure it's still supported.

Brad

---

From: indesi...@googlegroups.com <indesi...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dick Margulis <di...@dmargulis.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2023 7:14 PM
To: indesign-talk <indesi...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: [ID] Indesign alignment

 

What is needed is a vertical spaceband that works the same as a horizontal spaceband. Build it into a heading style, say two above and one below for an A head, two above and zero below for a B head, one above and zero below for a C head. (Or whatever distribution works for a given book. Now when you select vertical justification, you don't card the body text lines. Instead, only the space above and below the heads gets adjusted, in proportion to the number of spacebands.

It's not hard to conceptualize, and it shouldn't be all that hard to implement.

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[Olav Martin Kvern]

brad kenozatype.com wrote: "...but I'm not entirely sure it's still supported."

It's a script, so it should work. Not much has changed in InDesign scripting since CS6. Plug-ins (written in C++ using the InDesign SDK) have to be recompiled from one major version to another (and sometimes between minor releases, in spite of Adobe's promises that this would never be necessary); scripts do not. Sometimes, CC extensions (yet a different flavor of InDesign extensibility) need to be rewritten between major versions, but it's not usually required. It's important to keep track of the different kinds of add-ons that exist for InDesign. Adobe is no help, referring to basically everything as "plug-ins." They probably no longer know the difference, or assume that users are too ignorant to be trusted with that information.

...and, since it's a script, any of you could write a version that does exactly what you want it to do.

That said, vertical justification is not a good thing to do. If you look at the "after" example provided at https://www.id-extras.com/products/vertical-justification/, you can see "leading creep" which is always a mistake. Again, it's a sign of unskilled graphic design and typesetting.

Dick Margulis wrote: "What is needed is a vertical spaceband that works the same as a horizontal spaceband. Build it into a heading style, say two above and one below for an A head, two above and zero below for a B head, one above and zero below for a C head. (Or whatever distribution works for a given book. Now when you select vertical justification, you don't card the body text lines. Instead, only the space above and below the heads gets adjusted, in proportion to the number of spacebands."

Exactly. This is the start of how you design using a leading grid. This cannot be hard for anyone here--especially for book designers.

Thanks,

Ole

[Dick Margulis]

On 7/27/2023 1:41 AM, Olav Martin Kvern wrote:

Dick Margulis wrote: "What is needed is a vertical spaceband that works the same as a horizontal spaceband. Build it into a heading style, say two above and one below for an A head, two above and zero below for a B head, one above and zero below for a C head. (Or whatever distribution works for a given book. Now when you select vertical justification, you don't card the body text lines. Instead, only the space above and below the heads gets adjusted, in proportion to the number of spacebands."

Exactly. This is the start of how you design using a leading grid. This cannot be hard for anyone here--especially for book designers.

Olav, may I press a bit on your point? It is not hard to adjust a page correctly, in the sense that, yes, I'm a book designer, and I used to do this day in and day out with an X-Acto knife at a light table, and I do it now by adding space-above and space-below as needed in InDesign. But it is more time-consuming than it needs to be. So when you say that my suggestion of an automated way of achieving this result "cannot be hard for anyone here," I wonder whether you are suggesting there's an easy way to add this functionality to InDesign. Is there some add-on or script that provides the automated functionality I'm suggesting, or do you mean that it should be trivial for me to create such a script, or do you just mean that doing it manually is not at all difficult? I'm just seeking clarity regarding your assertion.

Thanks,

Dick

[R Evans]

I, too, am a book designer/compositor who, like Dick, started out adding space to pages with an Xacto knife at a light table. I always use InDesign's baseline grid, but a grid works up to the first half-space above/below a block element, and again at the bottom of the page, but not necessarily in between.

Having been a reprint manager, I leave notes on the pasteboard of the first page of every book I typeset or revise to help the next person understand how the file was put together. Here are notes about spacing for a book using 14 pt text linespacing with 100s of short dialog blocks using 1/2 spaces above/below the blocks:

Para tags created for more space above to cross align spreads (std = +7 pts):

+7 ÷ 2 (or 14 ÷ 4) 10.5    (facing page is 1/2-line longer)

+7 ÷ 3 (or 14 ÷ 6) 9.33

+7 ÷ 4 (or 14 ÷ 8) 8.75

+7 ÷ 5 8.4

Other spacing, no para style:

+14 ÷ 3 11.66

I’ve thought about creating spacer paragraphs (+3.5 pts, +2.33 pts, +1.75 pts) and giving them different left indents (3p, 2p, 1p) so I could see what they were by the position of their paragraph symbol, but it feels dangerous to scatter empty paragraphs through a file.

I would definitely buy V-justity if I could transfer extra spacing to the text as local formatting once the book was finalized, then un-V-justify the text frames so the InDesign file was as vanilla as possible for the next user, who might not have V-justify.

Rebecca

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[Olav Martin Kvern]

Dick Margulis wrote: "...  I used to do this day in and day out with an X-Acto knife at a light table..."

Yes, me too! I also set type--I was a Compugraphic 8500 EditWriter operator before this desktop publishing fad came along.:-)

Now for the tl;dr part--sorry!

re: scripting

Actually, Adobe made this harder than it should be if you're on a newer Mac OS version. If you're using Windows, or a Mac OS system that can run 32-bit applications, then you can still use the ExtendScript Toolkit to write/debug scripts. But if you're using something newer, you have to use Microsoft Visual Studio Code (not the full Visual Studio). Getting started with VS Code is much more complicated than using the ESTK. While it's true that you can write scripts using any text editor, it's really helpful to be able to debug.

I think that anyone here can write scripts. My goal, while I was at Adobe, was to turn every InDesign user into an InDesign scripter, or at least let everyone know that they could do it. I wanted to empower everyone to write their own automated solutions to their own problems--to give users a way to seize control of InDesign itself, rather than waiting for Adobe to add this feature or that. I got a fair amount of criticism from developers--many of them feel that "creative" types are not intelligent enough to learn even the simplest programming language. I disagree, and I still disagree. After all, I started out as a creative, "intuitive" type--and if I could figure it out, anyone can. I had to overcome fierce internal resistance (my own!) to learn it--now I realize I was holding myself back.

Adobe has a different idea about this now--they're much more centered around people who are already software developers. I firmly believe that this is wrong. I'm planning to write a blog post about it in the near future, and will attempt to demystify the changes that they've made. Software developers are no more intelligent than InDesign users, and their brains do not work differently. If they can do it, how hard can it be?:-)

At the very least, I want InDesign users to understand that they can use scripts, even if they don't write them themselves.

Okay, so back to leading grids. In a leading grid design, you base your design on the leading of the body text. All vertical spacing in the document is defined in *whole* increments of that spacing. If your body text leading is 11.4 pt, paragraph space above and space below (for headings, for example) will use 11.4 pt, 22.8 pt, 32.2, and so on. Leading should also follow this rule (type size can differ, but should work with the specified leading). The height of your text frames will use the same increments. The first baseline offset should be set to use the leading method. Indents, tabs, etc. all use the same increments. (I admit that I have sometimes been forced to use half-increments for spacing between list items, for example, but I set things up so that the next body text paragraph following a list goes back on the grid.)

Once you have this set up, everything magically snaps into place. You no longer have to agonize about how much or how little space to add to adjust a layout. If you've done it right, you also don't have to use InDesign's baseline grid features--the typesetting alone does the work for you.

Years ago (like, 30+ years ago), I read a great book, "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" by Josef Muller-Brockmann, and it completely changed my way of thinking about layout. It made sense to me to base everything on the leading of the body text--leading and line length are two of the most critical factors affecting the readability of a text. Next, when we create a design, we are training the reader's eye in how to interpret the text. We use text sizes and weights, but we generally communicate the importance of a given paragraph using space. The reader unconsciously senses the underlying structure of the text. When we start adding/subtracting arbitrary amounts of space, we end up working against the reader, and against our design goals.

At first, I thought that using leading grid techniques in a rigorous, systematic way was somehow not creative--that I was working against my sense of design. Once it clicked, though, I realized how liberating it is--I could spend more time on other aspects of my designs.

Whew. Sorry to go on for so long, but this is about as short as I can make it!

Thanks,

Ole

[Olav Martin Kvern]

Rebecca Evans wrote about spacing adjustments. 

One of the things that can seem like a problem in grid-based design is that pages can run short or long. I don't worry too much about this, because it doesn't affect readability, and readers don't notice a variation of one line or two on facing pages. It's much more critical that the reader's eye is not confused about where a line starts--which is part of the problem with "leading creep" between columns.

This is why I'm not fond of vertical justification--it breaks the reader's rhythm when going from page to page or column to column. It's similar to why I hate text wrap that changes line length in a column--the visual effect is not worth the harm to readability.

Of course, these are all just my opinions! I can be wrong, but I try to learn from my mistakes. Learning about grid based design showed me a lot of mistakes that I'd made, so I changed my mind about it. I'm pretty sure I referred to it as "fascist," at some point.:-)

Thanks,

Ole

[John Kramer Design]

Ole: 100%

[R Evans]

I hear you, Ole and Dick. Good information.

When I got my graphics degree in the ’70s, I had to take classes in Assembly (if you can believe that), Fortran, and Cobol. One of my early jobs was as a systems librarian writing in SQL and Cobol so you’d think I could write an InDesign script. I just bought a MacBook Pro but have a workhorse of a 2013 iMac running Mojave that would let me use ExtendScript.

Rebecca

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indesign-talk/9f5bc83f-95f3-476f-949a-553508a077c2n%40googlegroups.com.

[Dick Margulis]

Rebecca,

I started with IBM 1620 numeric machine language, followed by SPS and
Fortran with Format in a two-week summer class that IBM offered to my
junior-year AP math class in 1962. The following summer, I worked for a
medical research group that had just purchased a 1620, doing systems
programming and application programming. I went on to more languages in
college and in the years beyond. But in the last couple of decades, I've
lost my edge. I can imagine what a script ought to do in this situation,
but I no longer have the patience for learning yet another scripting
language and figuring out how to add new attributes to a style
definition and then turn those attributes into modifications to the
output. If I were forty years younger, I'd tackle it.

Dick

On 7/28/2023 2:11 PM, R Evans wrote:
> I hear you, Ole and Dick. Good information.
>
> When I got my graphics degree in the ’70s, I had to take classes in
> Assembly (if you can believe that), Fortran, and Cobol. One of my
> early jobs was as a systems librarian writing in SQL and Cobol so
> you’d think I could write an InDesign script. I just bought a MacBook
> Pro but have a workhorse of a 2013 iMac running Mojave that would let
> me use ExtendScript.
>
> Rebecca

[R Evans]

That’s pretty much how I feel, too!

[Sharon Villines]

> On Jul 28, 2023, at 2:26 PM, Dick Margulis <di...@dmargulis.com> wrote:
>
> But in the last couple of decades, I've lost my edge. I can imagine what a script ought to do in this situation, but I no longer have the patience for learning yet another scripting language and figuring out how to add new attributes to a style definition and then turn those attributes into modifications to the output. If I were forty years younger, I'd tackle it.

I feel the same way about computer graphics and video stuff. I tackled Photoshop and Affinity Photo again last week. I’ve used them for years but I use them the same way I paint and draw and design type on paper. What I see is what I want and I’ve avoided all the complexities of histograms and channels and 6+ systems for specifying a color. After 65 years of professional education, practice, and teaching, I know what color I want and am not interested in things that move. Fortunately, I don’t have to translate what I do for printers or colleagues.

But last week I was trying to master layer masks so I could show a condominium building accurately with a different color on each of 6 different architectural elements to produce an infinite variety of exterior paint colors with the click of a mouse. To do this “correctly” and have any chance of convincing 70+ owners to accept color changes, I had to remember that painting things opaque black on the screen was not blocking them out, it was creating transparencies. The language is so formidable because it doesn’t relate to anything material or familiar. You have to forget "all that.” Words don’t mean the same thing. In programming, they don’t even look like words.

A number of years ago I had a student who was returning to college at age 50 to become a psychologist. Since she was a very well-paid vice president at a major bank, I was curious about why. She said she had supervised the whole process of installing a whole new computer system and training all the employees on new software _three times_. And the bank was talking about doing it again. Enough said.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC
"Reality is something you rise above." Liza Minnelli