How hyphenation affects to space between each word?

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 8, 2021
5 replies
323 views

First of all, sorry about my english. I speak finnish normally.

I have Indesign text box, where use use "Justify with last line aligned left" - thing.

I use automatic hyphenation.

My question is: Is space between each word same in this case? Or does this make same thing, what would happen, if I would not use hypnetation: InDesign makes space between each word random amount.

Thanks for answers!

Type

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L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi jmlevy,

there are no magic numbers here. It depends on the font, font weight, font size and a myriad of other factors set in the paragraph style.

See into this sample below where the narrow column is not optimal for the German text, but the other two function very well. You can always tweak a bit and optimize. And you would perhaps end up with 4 to 5 basic styles where the layout person has to use style A for text column widths around 35 to 40 mm, style B for text column widths around 45 to 70 mm and so on.

And there is also the paper color. Text column one would be perhaps frowned upon when printed on a glossy paper, but hardly if you print on a newspaper with low contrast between the text color and the background.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

jmlevy

Community Expert

Firstable, I would say that it is quite impossible to get a proper justified text without any hyphenation. The reason is that, as you have noticed, the spaces between the words vary, to get the same lines length. @Barb Binder gave you some settings, but keep in mind that these settings work, as Barb wrote, for lines of approximatively 40 characters, which is not always possible, mainly in magazines or newspapers.

Another point to consider is the language structure by itself: the average number of letters in an English word is smaller than a French word (I am French) and even if I do not read a word of Finnish, it seems that Finnish words are very long, as German words. So settings for Finnish will necessary be different than settings for English or French. It would be interesting to get advices from German speaking people of this forum.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @Pauliina5E3D:

First of all, you should be able to type in Finnish—we have translation options—although what you wrote was very clear.

Here are the settings that work well for me—you can experiment with the values to see what works best for you. Do keep in mind that you want to have a line length of at least 40 characters (including spaces). When lines are too short, nothing really works well.