The quest for baseline alignment (to do or not to do?)

Hey! Sorry for being slow, but here I am.

Thank you so much for your feedback, it is incredibly valuable to me!

 

Note 1: Size looks fine. For the ToC, only the page numbers in roman numerals should be italic. Any regular numerals should be Roman (not italic). This goes for the running heads as well; you can do this manually in the parent page or apply an Italic character style to the roman numerals.

For the ToC, since I used the same paragraph style for the same kind of headers, I have had to manually change the three entries with arabic numerals to use Regular style. For the preface itself, are you also suggesting that the roman numerals in there should be italics? I use this same parent page both for the Editorial Notes (before the musical part, with Roman numerals) and for the Critical Notes (after the music, with Arabic numerals). Were I to follow your suggestion I think I would need to make a separate parent page with italic numbers for the Editorial Note. Is that correct?

Note 2: You're right, those few lines could be tighter. You can adjust the paragraph style to not apply baseline grid, assuming you have a separate paragraph style for those lines (which you definitely should).

Awesome, thank you! Yes, I have almost too many paragraph styles — perhaps there is not "too many" when it comes to PS, though 🙂 

Suggestions:

Paragraphs following a heading should be flush left, no indent in the first lines. It's important to have a separate paragraph style for this, everything the same as the body style but no first line indent.

Thank you for this! It looks so much better.

I have created a copy of the main body PS and set it to bear no indent. Trying to make things quicker, I applied it as "Next Style" to the various Headings used in the Preface, hoping that it would automatically fix all of them. It did not. There are a few reasons I think that why that may be but I am not sure. Is it normal for this to behave like this?

I have also set the next style for the no-indent body to be its indented version but, upon pressing Return, it didn't work. This I really do not know why. My intuition is that it may have to do with parenting, the no-indent being a copy of the indent one, but that may be unrelated. 

Any idea? 

Adding additional (new) text to the end of the preface worked as intended though. So, may it be that existing text is not being influenced by these changes?

 

Footnote callouts (the numbers in the text) should follow the periods with no spaces.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I am using British English with an academic style and, from what I have learned, the callout goes before the period in this case. It goes after the period in American English, though. I am no expert in this, but it is what I have read around and been advised to do. Ready to be contradicted!

 

What font are you using? I see you've used small caps in the Exercise headings, but it doesn't look as if the font contains small caps, so it's making its own, but they are too light. You could play around with using one weight higher than the headline text, but only if you have a few weights to try, because making them bold would probably be too dark. If you only have Roman, italic, and bold, you probably shouldn't use small caps.

Very interesting remark. 

The font I am using is Rooney Sans for the inner cover and Rooney for the text. They are both Adobe Fonts. How can one check that a font has or doesn't have small caps? This font has Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Heavy, and Black so plenty to play with. Starting from Bold, I set the lowercase letters to Heavy and, while a big too fat to me, it looks more cohesive. Do you think that leaving it as it is would be a bad design choice? 

Generally speaking, I wasn't using small caps in my design before so I may just as well revert to ordinary capitalisation. What do you think?

 

In your screenshot, you marked that you had to do a lot of fiddling to get the # sign to align with the baseline. There's a nifty tool in the top bar that lets you shift the position of text up or down point by point (see below). Notice that the capital C is a point higher than the rest of the letters. This might be easier for you.

Oh, I have fiddled with baseline shift more than one ever should but nothing, it would not bulge. Perhaps the font used to render the musical symbols is not too prone to collaborating but, in any case, the only thing that worked reliably was editing the Text Frame Options so that the Baseline type would be either of Ascent, Baseline, or x-height. Sometimes one would work, sometimes the other would work. Not knowledgeable enough to know or understand why at this point. I've not yet had enough Nigel French in my InDesign life 🙂

 

Lastly, if at all possible it's good practice to "balance" the pages at the bottom. If you want to spend the time making sure the pages all end on the same line, you can get a how-to for tracking and kerning at this link: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/kerning-tracking.html .

This is another very good point. 

The first thing I noticed is that the chosen baseline does not divide perfectly into the text frame, resulting in the last line always being empty. Not a big deal since this is consistent throughout. I would try to make it more precise in a future project, though. 

I asked myself several times why the last few lines of several columns would remain empty but the only reason I found as a possible culprit would be my paragraph style's Keep Options, which are like this to avoid orphaned lines:

These settings certainly do what I tasked them to, but have the side effect that you mentioned.

I am not sure how changing the tracking-kerning would help here; perhaps making paragraphs stretch to the end of the column? Or something else? 

Going page by page in the new version attached below (using PDF page number):

• page 3: the first paragraph of the second column could easily have 2 lines in the previous column but, when I uncheck the "keep together" option, only the first line goes back, even if there is a full leading space available. No idea why. I thought that my space above first footnote could be too great but it's not that.
• page 6: the paragraph before the quote could go in the previous column but them only one line would be orphaned in the second column and, in my opinion, it would look worse. 
• page 7: by editing the Keep Options for the last paragraph of the first column, I could get the two columns to end up together but the line with "s/he deems useful for each specific case." would remain alone at the top of the column and it doesn't look great. Would you suggest trying the other way around by adding a Column break at the penultimate line of the second column?
• page 10, end of second column: if I edit the Keep Options of the first body paragraph of page 11 to keep only 1 line together at start, then 2 lines go back to page 10. It's ok but it doesn't look great to me. I vastly prefer the entire exercise to begin on a new column. 
• page 11 & 13: I managed to achieve equal bottoms by changing the space above/below for the picture to the right. 
• page 16: if I fix it, then page 17 will become problematic. I guess one cannot have everything!

Kindly let me know what you think of this, no rush at all!

Thank you once again for your fantastic feedback!