Is there a way to change the justification without altering paging?

[BelowTheCrowd]

Hi All. I'm new here. I've done a search for this specific problem but I'm not sure if anybody can help point me in the right direction.

I am dealing with a document that is about 8000 pages long. The document broken down into about 1000 chapters (yeah, it's a real page turner... )

I had someone do the layout, and unfortunately he chose to center-justify (and stretchto the margins) the text. I want to change the text to left justified text, but doing so is changing the pagination. (there are certain lines of text with a ridiculous amount of white space between words and other LinesThatLookLikeTheyAreASingleWord). Left justifying, fixes the spacing issues but totally moves all of the pages around due to the new spacing. Is there a way to maintain the current pagination by locking text to specific pages? Thanks! BTC

 

[jmgalvin]

This is a beauty - 8000 pages of, apparently, garbage layout that has to get fixed.

No matter what you do, without repagination it's going to look awful. You'll end up with gobs of emptiness on some pages and too much on others. Theoretically you could insert a page break at the end of each present page, but the result will be ugly.

There are all sorts of things you can try via paragraph styles but it would probably be easier to and faster to let the page numbers shuffle and trash any possible empties if necessary.

For a quick fix try, if you have a paragraph style applied to the whole thing, is to open that style and click Justication. If Adobe Paragraph Composer is checked, try Single line composer. It probably won't help much but it's worth a try.

If you want to try more, you'd have to come back and say how the guy did the doc. Are there paragraph styles or did he just make a master text frame and apply the settings from the paragraph pallette to that.

Still it would be an awful lot of work as opposed to renumbering the pages and redoing a TOC if necessary.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4