How to auto squeeze text in a line in indesign

Question

I am laying out the residential pages for a directory. Each page has 2 columns, and naturally there are many names that can't fit on one line. After I bring in all the names and apply the character and paragraph styles, there are many names that don't fit on one line, so I manually go through each page and adjust the tracking and kerning of those names.

Is there a smarter way to automatically make each listing fit on one line?

I'm attaching a blurred image so you can get the idea.

Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted Answer

Yeah, not to be repetitive, redundant and reiterative, but as there's next to zero chance of successfully making this a fully automated process, a streamlined/assisted manual review and touchup would cover all the bases in the most efficient and "best outcome" way.

Or... you could play Ellis Island agent and just shorten any name that doesn't fit your standard typography! 🙂

(Not to propagate the urban myth here... no immigrant names were ever changed by US immigration.)

Yes, of course - script would be only 1st step.

And even if you can automate "only" 50% - it's half the time saved...

But then, with a right script - you can speed up your work even more - if you won't have to use mouse to select the problematic instances...

You could use just keyboard - use arrows to switch between those problematic instances - and use keyboard shortcuts to do something - squeeze more in any specific way - but you save time on mouse clicks...

I've done something like this few years ago for the Polish Patent Office - as part of a bigger solution - there was a lot of few rows tables - and columns there had to be resized individually to better fit contents - reduce number of rows, same as on this case - script allowed user to use up/down arrows to switch between tables - and left/right arrows to resize columns.

WAY quicker than constantly switching using mouse...

TᴀW · Answer

I think the correct answer is to allow some names to flow on to 2 lines.

If that's not possible, I think there is a built-in InDesign way of doing this, as follows:

(1) Presumably each line in the directory has a paragraph style (the same one for all) applied to it.

(2) In the para style definitions, enable "No Break", to make sure that the entire paragraph is always on a single line.

(3) In the Justification settings, set the minimum values of word spacing, letter spacing, and glyph scaling to something quite small (say 40%, -20%, 50%, respectively).

You should now find that InDesign automatically squishes all the names to fit on one line.

If the name is long, this can get ugly quite quickly. But if that's what is needed, I think it's the way to do it.

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