"Soft" spacing in InDesign/InCopy

[dbfriends]

Hi there,

The newspaper where I work is currently in the process of transferring from QuarkXPress (v3! yes, people are still using it...) to InDesign CS2. I've been charged with training copy editors in the new system and am, for the most part, getting to grips with it fairly well, but I am having one problem with text editing.

Because it's a newspaper, we obviously work with quite narrow columns. A consequence of this is that we frequently get lines with only three words - and really wide spaces between them. In QuarkXPress, and its CopyDesk companion, I can "fix" spaces like this by what we call "soft-spacing" - effectively replacing all the spaces in a document with the Shift-space character.

You can see examples of what I mean in the image below - top one is as the text comes in, bottom one with the "soft" spacing applied.

The problem I am having in InDesign is that all of the smaller spaces, such as this, seem to be non-breaking. This means that, if I simply do a search and replace to change all the regular spaces into "soft" spaces, every single line turns on a hyphenated word - and InDesign eventually refuses to do any more of those and simply throws up an overmatter box instead.

The only way I can figure out to make it look like this is to insert a quarter-space, followed by a discretionary line-break (it looks like ^4^k in the replace box). This will cause problems with copy editing, as we process vast amounts of text in a pretty short amount of time - and it's a hassle to have to remember to copy two characters every time I just want to add in an extra space!

Is there something really obvious I'm missing? Or can InDesign just not do what I'm looking for?

Any help will be much appreciated... thanks in advance.

 

[dbfriends]

Sorry, just to add... I in fact just discovered that the discretionary line-break is apparently a CS3 only feature! Is there any equivalent so I can do this in CS2?!

 

[MarcusStringer]

Can I ask why you don't go to CS3 if you are migrating to InDesign anyway?

Because CS3 has a lot more additional space options

CS2 does not have a Fixed Width space feature like CS3

We had to insert a Fixed Space in the form of an En space between the words to get the affect of your example.

Try setting your Paragraphs to "Adode Paragraph Composser" with the Hyphenation turned off.

You can also, under Edit>Keyboard Layout, turn on Compatible with Quark, which means that most of quarks shortcuts will used, which might make the transition a little easier for your co-workers

Unless I'm not understanding you properly.



Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[eugenetyson]

What would help you with this is the Hyphenation and Justification Settings, they are Paragraph Style related, i.e., you incorporate the H&J's into the paragraph style you have asssigned to your body text.

Typically for Body text in narrow columns, I use a

Word Spacing

Min: 95% Desired 100% and Max 105%

Letter Spacing: -5% Desired: 0% Maximum 5%

Glyph Scaling: -95% Desired: 100% Maximum 105%

And Change the Composer to : Adobe Paragraph Composer

In the Hyphenation:

Check Hyphenate

I use the slider to adjust the between Better Spacing (more hyphens) and Fewer Hypens (Spacing is worse).

You just have to find a happy medium for your text. You can even specify how many hyphens you have in your paragraph.

 

[dbfriends]

Marcus: Thanks for your help. I'd love to move to CS3, but we're getting it as part of an external publishing package which still only supports CS2 (tho we're promised an upgrade at some point in the future... can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned). I tried using the En space, but it seems to have the same problem - ie it's a non-breaking one, so every line turns on a hyphen again. I can't really turn off hyphenation as we need some lines to turn on one - although it does give the desired effect if I manually change the spaces on awkward lines to En spaces, this is what I'm trying to avoid as it's time-consuming.

Eugene: Unfortunately we have very specific H&J rules in Quark at the moment, which I'm trying not to fiddle with (ie no more than three hyphens in a row, which means we often end up back with this problem).

What does the Adobe Paragraph Composer setting do?

 

[eugenetyson]

Adobe Single Line-Composer

In the past, programs like QuarkXpress and PageMaker have used single-line composition methods to flow text. This method marches line by line through a paragraph and sets each line as well as possible using the applied hyphenation and justification settings. The effect of modifying the spacing in one line on the lines above and below is not considered in single-line composition. If adjusting the space within a line causes poor spacing on the next line, tough luck. When you use the Adobe Single-Line Composer, the following rules apply:

Adjusting word spacing is preferred over hyphenation.
Hyphenation is preferred over glyph scaling.
and
If spacing must be adjusted, removing space is preferred over adding space.

Adobe Paragraph Composer
InDesign's Adobe Paragraph Composer (called the Multi-Line Composer in previous versions of CS2) is selected by default. It takes a broader approach to composition by looking at the entire paragraph at once. If a poorly spaced line can be fixed adjusting the spacing of a previous line, the Paragraph Composer reflows the previous line. The Paragraph Composer is governed by the following principles:

The evenness of letter spacing and word spacing is the highest priority. The desirability of possible breakpoints is determined by how much they cause a word and letter spacing to vary from the Desired settings.

Uneven spacing is preferred to hyphenation. A breakpoint that does not require hyphenation is preferred over one that does.

All possible breakpoints are ranked, and good breakpoints are preferred over bad ones.

The paragraph composer is more sophisticated that the single-line option, offering generally better overall spacing because it sacrifices optimal spacing a bit on one line to prevent really bad spacing on another, something the single-line method does not do.

However, there is one frustration in dealing with the paragraph composer: When you to edit text or play with tracking to get rid of an orphan or widow, the paragraph composer keeps adjusting the text across several lines, often counteracting the nips and tucks. The single-line composer doesn't do that.

 

[MarcusStringer]

Unfortunately, it seems you are limited to the restrictions of CS2.

You will find a lot of differences between Quark and InDesign and visa versa.

These are the things you will have to deal with...

And I think changing the H+Js to get a better result is one of those changes.

Changing to Paragraph composer and also inserting En spaces will solve you problem.

And because you only have a three hyphen policy you have to compensate somewhere.

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au

 

[dbfriends]

Many thanks for both of your help. I'll have a look at that Paragraph composer setting when I'm in work tomorrow, hopefully that might make a bit of difference. Otherwise I guess we're stuck with manually inserting En spaces until CS3 is rolled out...!

 

[eugenetyson]

CS3 is here!!!!