Participant

Question

Questions on justification and roman numerals

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 6, 2024
2 replies
454 views

A couple of questions.

First question is how do I make Roman numerals for page numbers in headers lower case? I've selected LC for the type when I put in the number marker, but I only get UC Roman numerals. I don't want IV but iv. I can't find any other way to make them LC.

Second question is about justification. I use a full justification setting for my paragraph settings, but that results in all sorts of spurious behavior with words spaced out or squashed together. My word spacing settings are 80% 100% 125% and I've played with them to no avail. Sometimes playing with the tracking value works, but not always.

What I think will fix the problem is allowing the full justification to have paragraph orphans. Many of the books I have use paragraphs with orphan sentences such as the above paragraph. I've played with the keep options and hyphenation to no avail. I can't find a way to have full justification but allow paragraph orphans so that I have a nice, within parameters, paragraph with the orphan solving any spacing issues. I don't want to go paragraph by paragraph and insert returns for any paragraph that's squashed or add something to paragraphs that are too open. My book is 700 pages long. Allowing the last sentence to be left justified while the rest of the paragraph is fully justified seems to be fairly common. I'm not at all satisfied with the Adobe justification algorithms. Any suggestions?

Thanks. -Doug

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

rob day

Community Expert

I use a full justification setting for my paragraph settings, but that results in all sorts of spurious behavior with words spaced out or squashed together.

Hi @Douglas3559143013rd , Just to clarify, you are setting all of your paragraphs to Full Justify (the last line is justified even when it is short), and not Left Justify (all the lines above the last line are justified with the last line left aligned) right?

If that‘s the case the Composer you choose in the Justification dialog is going to have a significant affect on the setting. If you choose Adobe Paragraph Composer all of the paragraph’s lines will be adjusted according to your rules, and if you choose Adobe Single Line, the last (short?) line’s justification adjustment will not affect the lines above. Paragraph vs. Single Line Composer:

Also, your Justification settings are a set of rules which can be ridged or flexible. If you don’t allow any flexibility— e.g. 100|100|100 Word Spacing, 0|0|0 Letter Spacing, and 100|100|100 Glyph Scaling, there will be more cases where your preferred rules will have to be be violated. So with H&J Violations turned on in preferences almost all of the lines are going to show rule violations with Fully Justified paragraphs, along with a ridged set of rules, and the Adobe Paragraph Composer:

With more flexible rules and Adobe Single Line Composer, the violations are mostly limited to the short last lines:

D

Douglas3559143013rdAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the reply. I tried the single line composer but didn't seem to get the results I wanted because there still seemed to be some squashed and spaced lines. I interpreted the single line composer as only considering the words on each line independently, and not allowing for a full balance in the entire paragraph. I do use the more flexible justification settings as in your second example for letter and glyph. I've tried adding hard returns at the end of a paragraph to force some words into a new bottom line and using left justification, but that doesn't always work right.

One thing that I think is messing up the composer is that my book is a professional book and I use a LOT of footnotes. This causes all sorts of issues because the start of each footnote has to be on the same page where it's called out.

I'll keep trying.

-Doug

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

As for page numbering, setting the section and numbering options to the lower-case Roman style works fine for me, and always has (use often for front matter, etc.) I'd check the number paragraph style to make sure it's not being forced to uppercase or the like; check any applied character style, GREP style, line style etc. that might be inadvertently applied. (First step/quick check: on the Parent page, assign something neutral like Body or Basic Paragraph to the numbering, to likely clear any such style settings.)

I am not completely clear on your justification question, but if you are using "full" full justification, applied to paragraph last lines, it's nearly impossible to have a perfectly-justified last line on most paragraphs. Use the full/left justification so that the bottom line is not subjected to being sprung out across the margin width. I am not sure why you think solidly justified paragraphs are necessary/desirable, much less possible with normal text variations. 🙂

I'd reset all justification values to default and if you really think ID has done a poor job of balancing the spacing, very tiny tweaks to the percentages are all that is normally used, even by the fussiest designers.

D

Douglas3559143013rdAuthor

Participant

I'm using full justification applied to an entire paragraph. I've tried very small tweaks to the percentages - some successful and some not. I think I have about 15 paragraph designs with different tweak and other settings to cover special cases. I think solidly justified paragraphs just look better. My book is a professional book and nearly all the professional books I have use very nice fully justified paragraphs with the last line being a left justified orphan. Another answer suggested the single line composer but the behavior I want is for the composer to start at the beginning of the paragraph, stay within the settings as it runs through the paragraph, and if there are words left over to put them on a new line and left justify them. I was hoping there was a way to tell InDesign to do that because I see that type of paragraph design in a lot of books.

I want to use LC Roman numerals for front matter just as you say. I'll look around at the other settings as you suggest and see if I can find anything. All I did was create a header, insert the character mark for page number, and justify it left or right depending on even or odd page numbers.

Thanks for responding.

-Doug

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I'm using full justification applied to an entire paragraph.

This is pointless and absurd, something done only with, perhaps short paragraphs in an "artistic" book. It simply isn't done in text publishing, and it brings nothing to the result.

You will not be able to accomplish your goal without carefully rewriting each paragraph to a precise length, which is almost certainly to the detriment of your "professional book" clarity and comprehensibility. It is not a matter of finding some magic combination of justification settings.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded