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Is it possible to program indesign to make a line break to little words besides 4 letters ?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 5, 2022
4 replies
572 views

Hi,

Is it possible to program indesign to make a line break to words of 4 letters or less that are at the end of the line? I don't like to have these little words at the end of the lines.

Thank you very much !

Sincerely

Arthur

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Peter Kahrel

Eugene's expression works at paragraph end (because of the $). To avoid words of 4 characters or fewer at any line, apply no-break to the space after all those words:

Find what: \b\w{1,4}\b\K\h
Change to: <Leave empty>
Change format: no-break

\b\w{1,4}\b matches words of 4 characters or fewer, \K is a look-behind (so that the words aren't actually selected, so to speak), and \h is any horizontal space.

As Peter S. said, that could produce some ugly type.

Peter Kahrel

Correct answer

Community Expert

Eugene's expression works at paragraph end (because of the $). To avoid words of 4 characters or fewer at any line, apply no-break to the space after all those words:

Find what: \b\w{1,4}\b\K\h
Change to: <Leave empty>
Change format: no-break

\b\w{1,4}\b matches words of 4 characters or fewer, \K is a look-behind (so that the words aren't actually selected, so to speak), and \h is any horizontal space.

As Peter S. said, that could produce some ugly type.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Thanks that's much cleaner

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Apologies for misinterpeting your issue

This GREP should work

\w+?.\b\w{1,4}\>.$

A

Arthur25972238ftkmAuthor

Participant

No problem.

The line didn't work for me, I tried both with no break et [without] style and nothing happened. I checked that my style was successfully applied to my text. It didn't manage to prevent short words from ending any line.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

The way I read the question the OP wants to prevent words of 4 characters or less at the end of ANY line, not prevent words of 4 characters from breaking at the end of the story.

As far as I know this can only be done by scripting, if at all.

I would also say it is a recipe for really ugly pages.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Couldn't the GREP be modified to apply any 4-letter words? I imagine if a space precedes it, and a space or punctuation follows it, would find most of the culprits. It really wouldn't matter if it was at the end of a line or not.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Peter Spier

Community Expert

The request, as I read it is not to prevent breaking 4-letter words (which can be accomplished in hyphenation settings), but to prevent short words from ending a line.

Scanning the posts here, I see, I believe, nine lines ending in short words, including several that end paragraphs.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Use GREP styles in your paragraph styles.

First, create a character style, and call it no break or something like that - in the Font section you can set it to No Break tick mark- don't include any styles or font infomration.

In your paragraph style go to the Grep Style and search for the last 4 words in a paragraph

something like

( \w+?){4}.$

Then select the no break character style.

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