Automatically square off pages across a spread?

Alas, your setting rules for widows and orphans is at the root of your problem.

When you run across a page that would, say, leave a one line widow starting a paragraph at the bottom of your page, InDesign will automatically end the page early to skip the start of the paragraph to the next page. If you have, say, three words for the end of a paragraph for the next page, and you set orphan control for three lines, your previous page will end two lines early to provide enough lines for the paragraph at the start of the next one. Baseline grid and other conventional typographic conventions are not going to fix your problem.

So how do you fix it? By employing some unconventional typographic conventions. In short, we're going to cheat the copyfit.

There are a number of ways to do this, but whatever you do, you only want to do it once. So save these fixes for the last editing/proofing pass of your book. If you do these cheats for, say, three sets of revisions, you're going to be fixing/unfixing the fixes you made for the previous version(s) of the book and you will mess things up. So think of this as a One-Time Good Deal.

I would stay away from both kerning and tracking type to get better line breaks. Cheating spacing between characters beyond really minimal differences can greatly affect the readability of your copy. By alternative, I'd suggest you consider an alternative to increase your character count per line: character width.

The following example shows two columns of Lorem Ipsum type. They're set in Times New Roman, 12-point type with 13.5 points leading. The first column is at 100 percent; the second is at 95 percent width:

Setting the type at 95% width globally got me four more lines of text in the text frame, on a letter-sized page with default margins, set in four columns halfway down the page. It also greatly improved the rag on the right side of the column, compared to the example at left. Type snobs may howl that I've distorted the purity of the original letterforms, but if they actually catch me by comparing the last word fugit at the end of the first paragraph, I'd truly be surprised.

Still, I've got a single word orphan at the bottom of the first paragraph. I don't want that little fugit hanging out all by itself. So if I highlight that first paragraph by quickly quadruple clicking in it -- one-two-three-four -- and changing the character width 2 more percent to 93, I can skip that little fugit up and hide it in the previous line, like so:

Now you have to be careful changing the character width of an individual paragraph in text. Going past 3-4 percent variation from paragraph to paragraph in a page spread will get likely you caught at your tricks. Comparing the paragraph at 100 percent to the left to the 1st graf at 93 percent gives indications of some shenanigans. But compared to the 95% width of the 2nd paragraph below, the quick fix is not quite so evident.

The bigger the paragraph you adjust with character width, the less of a variation you need to apply to get the results you're looking for. So this won't work as well for two-line paragraphs of dialog. But for a long, descriptive paragraph a minor copyfit adjustment with character width can go a long, long way.

In both instances, the letterspacing settings are unaffected and I'd contend the readability of the text is similarly unaffected. Hopefully this will help you get a little better copyfit from your problematic widow/orphan line breaks.

Good luck,

Randy