leading

If you decide to "cheat character width" (as Randy suggested in #3), you can do that in InDesign by selecting the text and choosing Justification from the Control panel or the Paragraphs panel. You don't need to have justified text to make use of this feature.

Adjusting Word Spacing is usually less noticeable than adjusting Letter Spacing. Minor amounts of Glyph Minimum and Maximum scaling can sometimes do the trick. In any case, these setting must be used with care. The adjustments must be very minor or the text will not look good. I consider using this dialog box to be a last resort.

Hi,

Someone working for a newspaper using hundreds of multi-columns stories, asked me if I had an idea to solve it! …

Basically, I answered him: play until you win lines to make disappear the gap, using "Justification" micro-adjustments!

Of course, finally, he just needed 1 click to explore and treats all the docs of his journal!! … just funny to see the machine play itself with text!

Best,

Michel, for FRIdNGE

Newspapers typically use 10 point type, but that can vary. There is no standard.

If you increase the leading for one story, the surrounding stories should have increased leading as well. (As SJRiegel said, inconsistent leading between stories is undesirable.)

You could consider adding some subheads within the story to lengthen it. Or you could add a photo or illustration.

Many publications collect "filler" stories, one or two liners, sometimes longer, to fill in gaps, and plug in those stories whenever needed. They could be a safety reminder, an inspirational quote, an interesting statistic.

How you treat the extra space and the type of filler you use will depend on the nature of your newspaper.

I'm with SJRiegel.

I laid out newspapers for a number of years, and had three solid stand-bys that I'd happily use to quickly fill dead space on the page:

1) More picture. After first laying out the copy block(s), I'd generally size/crop the pictures to fill the available space. It's always easier to increase the size of an image than it is to somehow expand the size of a story. 1a) Typographic tricks like pull quote boxes and subheds within the story also help, as they not only help fill a little dead space but also help break up a sea of gray in the copy block.

2) House ads. Over time, most any publication accumulates a series of promotional ads to fill dead space in any given issue. For startups, one of the first thing I'd have the staff do when designing prototypes was generate filler/promo ads for the publication. In the design/sales prototype, they'd reinforce sales messages for the ad staff as they'd solicit advertising. After initial publication, they'd do the same for the readership ... and plug nasty little holes in layouts quickly and efficiently. Even for pages which don't carry ads -- like the front page and section fronts -- dropping those filler ads at the back end of story jumps off the front page give you wiggle room to fill the gaps on front pages before the jump.

3) Copyfit tricks (last resort). Rather than cheat the leading in an article, I'd cheat the character width ever-so-slightly for the story. A 1% variation in a 20-column-inch story can easily help fill a nasty half-inch gap ... at the expense of possible rivers of spacing gap in your type, bad breaks and widows/orphans within columns. Which require extra time and attention to make them look "right", which you generally can't afford when working with newspapers on deadline. But in newspapers, where the priority at deadline is to run all the news that fits, and ideally get it right while you do it, minor typographic faux pas are par for the course.

As far as type sizes, as other people have stated, those sizes are all over the map. Traditionally, type has been spec'd at 10-point with about 10% extra leading (so, 10/11-point leading) but as the readership of newspapers in the US has grown older, smaller community papers have been growing the size of body type to, ahem, address their graying readership's needs. I know one sports guy who spent way too much time editing agate pages who specs smaller type (9/9.8) but then wonders shy his bifocal prescription changes every six months and why his readership is declining. I've suggested to him that his pint-sized type spec may not be his only reason, but it certainly doesn't help.

The choice of type size depends on several factors, including the x-height of the font selected, the readability of the design, the column width, and the nature of the content (e.g editorial fonts are usually larger than fonts for classified ads). I suggest you experiment with some dummy pages to see what works best for your publication.

inconsistent leading between stories on the page makes for a messier look and hurts readability.

I would add a filler photo or for that half-inch, a decorative element.

Take a look at some major market newspapers to see how they handle this situation. It may be that you could add a sub-head under the headline to fill out the space