Creating a book. How to equalize columns with front pages?

My subtle cheat is to change the percentage width of characters in the paragraph as much as 3% to get better copyfit.

For example, Let's take the paragraph that begins with "Sali" and ends with "rabo." If you highlight the entire paragraph with your Text tool, then go to the Character Width edit box in your Control Panel, as shown above and reduce it to 99%. I'll bet that it reduces that paragraph at least one line in length. Since there are 14 lines in that paragraph, and a number of the lines are set "loose" with a lot of space between words because of justified text, it may even reduce the paragraph by two. Then try to reduce it more, first to 98%, then to 97%. If the paragraph didn't shrink by two lines when you first tried 99%, I'll offer it likely did by the time you reduced the character width to 97%.

The trick is to do this sparingly, starting with your longest paragraphs and the ones with the shortest last line. Those are the areas where the finest adjustments will have the largest impact. Let me offer a couple of caveats, though:

• Caveat One — Don't go too far in reducing (or increasing — this works both ways) the character width, or your trick will be evident to the trained eye. If you do this judiciously, even the tightest type snob with a specimen book won't be able to determine the scene of the minor copyfitting crime.
• Caveat Two — Don't do this until the last pass through the book, after all the editing and proofing is done and you're preparing to ship the book for final printing. If you do this trick repeatedly through book revisions, it'll make your job infinitely more difficult. Wait until everything is done and only do this once.

I used to do this work for a publishing client for nearly a decade, and the designers there marveled at how I could get better copyfit than they did. They never figured out my secret and I didn't tell them. Keep this trick under your hat and nobody will know how you did it either.

Hope this helps,

Randy

The situation in your screen shot generally occurs because of Keep Options set in the paragraph styles.

I've always handled this by adjusting the height of the frames by one line, or some judicious editing to add or lose a line in a paragraph (you can often do this by tracking just the spaces in a long paragraph), but there is no automatic method I know to do it. If someone else has one, please, I'd love to know, too.

The other alternative, which is automatic, but to my mind a mortal sin and extremely ugly, is to set the vertical justification to "Justified" but that will result in differnt line spacings ascross a spread.