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Chris  P.  Bacon
Inspiring
August 14, 2022
Answered

Perfectly justified columns?

  • August 14, 2022
  • 13 replies
  • 5546 views

Does anyone know how does The New York Times achieve these perfectly justified columns without extra spacing without words?

How do I do that in In Design?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer rob day

Hi @Chris P. Bacon 

I don’t think eliminating H&J violations means you’ll get the best setting—the violation highlight simply indicates lines where InDesign can no longer adhere to the rules you have set. So I might argue that the ideal is to not allow any hyphenation, word spacing, letter spacing, or glyph scaling (glyph scaling distorts the letter forms).

 

But obviously that’s not possible with a short measure—most of the lines create a violation—and it would look horrible with justified text as InDesign makes adjustments without knowing what your preferences are:

 

 

The InDesign default loosens up the rules for Word Spacing and allows word spacing to flex between the 80% and 133% , with the ideal being 100%. However, there will still be violations because there is no flexibility allowed with letter spacing and glyph scaling

 

 

If I set very liberal rules for word/letter spacing and glyph scaling, I can get rid of the violations, but at the cost of distorting and tracking the text:

 

 

I can tighten up the rules, get less distortions and tracking, and live with the violations:

 

 

I would rethink your 105% |120% |145% Glyph scaling—it’s distorting the the horizontal scaling to the point where it would be obvious to the reader. You want the desired setting to be 100%, and only allow a slight Minimum and Maximum change so the scaling is not discernible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

105|120|145 distortion:

 

     

13 replies

Steve Werner
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 14, 2022

I think that's the New Yorker, not the New York Times.

But to comment on spacing: They hyphenate and allow at least 2 hyphens in a row. I believe I see variations in word spacing. In the 2nd column, look at the line "great-grandfather planted a tree for my". It's definitely got tigher word spacing (probably down to a minimum value) so I think there is a range of word spacing in composition settings. There could even be variations in glyph scaling which are basically invisible to see with your eye. We would have to actually look at the compostion settings to know for sure.

Chris  P.  Bacon
Inspiring
August 14, 2022

True, it's The New Yorker, sorry.

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 14, 2022
  1. Justified paragraph alignment.
  2. Hyphenation.
  3. (Sometimes) Editing text to avoid bad breaks and spreads.
  4. Spot text spacing control using tracking and text width, usually in very small amounts.

 

Much of that is likely done by automation, which can be used and optimized when you have a rigid overall format used across years.

 

Chris  P.  Bacon
Inspiring
August 14, 2022

Without extra spacing between the words, I mean.