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Answered

InDesign Random Word Spacing Issue with Times Fonts Caused by Justification Settings

Forum|Forum|2 months ago
January 28, 2026
4 replies
157 views

There's weird spaces sometimes showing up randomly in the text in our text boxes (see below). It doesn't happen all the time and only happens in blocks of text (not the text in the graphics we create). We tried reloading all of fonts in the Times family and recreating our paragraph styles, but the problem continues. Does anyone know what might be causing this and how to fix it?

Correct answer Eccentric_contributor5CCF

I think you might be onto something with the justification settings. Those appear to be well off the default settings. The word spacing on one of our templates was minimum 50% and maximum 200% with letter spacing -5% to 25% and auto leading 120%. I’m not sure why this has become an issue all of the sudden but this definitely looks like it could be our issue. Thanks for the advice.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @Eccentric_contributor5CCF,

Thanks for sharing the details. I hope the suggestions from the experts help improve the spacing behavior you’re seeing. Could you please let us know if the issue is resolved after trying those recommendations, or if you’re still running into the random spacing problem across your documents?

In the meantime, I’m also sharing a few similar community threads where users have discussed comparable spacing and justification behavior, which might offer additional context or workarounds:
https://community.adobe.com/questions-671/random-leading-space-in-paragraph-text-overflow-881963
https://community.adobe.com/questions-671/problem-with-strange-character-spacing-827778
https://community.adobe.com/questions-671/extra-spaces-between-words-after-applying-a-text-wrap-901879

Please let us know how it goes.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

Barb Binder

Community Expert

These are the defaults:

And these are the ones I use, as advised by Nigel French

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Is this happening with all files, just this one, only new files, or only old ones?

What are the justification settings in your paragraph style?

Peter Spier

Community Expert

And it sound, from your first post, like this happens across multiple users/workstations?

That would make a prefs problem less likely, I think.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Which version of InDesign and OS are you using? And which paragraph composer?

This looks like it’s some sort of problem in the justification settings, but whether it’s font related, settings related, composer related, or maybe a bug I can’t say.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

And have you tried resetting the prefs?

E

Eccentric_contributor5CCFAuthor

Inspiring

We have not tried resetting the preferences because we have a lot of custom settings. I was hoping that would be a last resort.

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