Different spacing between one-line heading / multiple-line heading and a body text

Edit: Sorry, sir. This response was intended for the original poster, and not for you. Danged nested response threads. Mea culpa.

The best way is by manually doing the math to ensure your leading grid is maintained. This won't work with your dummy layout in your post, because each is a body type with a different leading set per line (But if you adjust the type values -- say, Headers of 10.5/11.5, and Body Copy of 10/11.5 -- it'd line up like you'd like ...).

You need to work in multiples of the leading space for one line of the smallest type you'll be dealing with. But if we could determine a consistent minimum leading value, the key is designing slugs of larger, display type in multiples of that minimum leading value. Let's use the example below, starting with three columns of type using a Question Text of Helvetica Bold Condensed at 13 points on a 13.5 point line, and an Answer Text style of Minion Pro, set at 12 points on a 13.5 point line (12/13.5). The type looks different, but the leading remains the same. So all the lines, well, line up.

Let's make it harder. We want to enter a subhed in the text of, say, 18/19.5. A leading value of 19.5 is 7.5 points short of two lines (13.5 X 2 = 27; 27 – 19.5 = 7.5). So we create a new 1-Line Subhed style with 7.5 points of extra space. If we use 4 points of space before and 3.5 points of space after the subhed style, everything still lines up like the example at right.

But dang it! One subhed is too long. It breaks across two lines, so it's best if we create one more style. Two lines of subhed set like we did before would fill a slug of 39 points. We need it to equal 40.5 points to take up as much space as three lines of type, or 54 points to take up four lines of leading grid. Adding 8 points above and 7 points space after in our 2-Line Subhed style lines everything up just like we had with only body type, because we maintained the 13.5 point leading grid.

If the variation between subhed spaces is too much, you could mitigate the difference to have each of the subheds take up an extra  line/13.5 points of space to maintain the leading grid. Once you do the math to determine the correct spacing to maintain your leading grid, create a new style for your two-line and three-line headers incorporating the best spacing to keep everything in line.

Also note that in the last illustration, the paragraph circled above the two-line subhed takes up one less line. I did that by cheating the character width of that one paragraph to 99% character width to get rid of that one-word orphaned last line. There are lots of tricks we can apply to get copy to fit the way we want it to ...

Hope this helps,

Randy

Hi J.P.,

let's talk exact values. What exact values would you like to see in the individual spaces before? After?

And: Do you see any logical issues if you align your body text to the baseline?

Maybe it's not doable what you want with the number of grid lines a possible headline could get? Maybe you have to plan for exceptions? Or you have to edit text so that the headlines come with only a distinct amount of grid lines horizontally?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )