Requested InDesign function: vertically justify text in all page frames

[Jim6C14]

Years ago (before InDesign was born), I used Corel Ventura Publisher. One of it's features that I dearly miss in InDesign was its ability to automatically vertically justify text on all pages. You could simply choose the paragraph styles to be justified and set a maximum limit to the leading. In a book, for example, the body text leading limit could be set to ±10% and the last line of every page would be at the page bottom. The last page of a chapter that ended part way down the page would remain unchanged because of the leading limit. Does InDesign have such a feature? If not, Adobe, can you please add this feature to InDesign?

[Joel Cherney]

I'd suggest that you head over to indesign.uservoice.com to make a feature request. Here, you will find more people who remember Ventura (lots of features in Ventura Publisher that I miss) but over there is where people vote on feature requests, and where InDesign devs post responses to people's feature requests and bug reports. 

There is a Vertical Justification option in the Text Frame Options but I've never used it, and don't know if there is any way to easily replicate the last-page-of-chapter feature you describe. 

[Eugene Tyson]

The easiest way would be to set your Text Frame on the master pages - then apply the Vertical Justification to the text frames. 

Then all pages will have this.

https://creativepro.com/indesign-basics-primary-text-frames/

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/aligning-text.html

[J E L]

@Jim6C14 I would find this feature useful as well and thanks for suggesting it. @Joel Cherney has a good idea to add this to the list of recommended features on Adobe InDesign: Feature Requests: Top (3903 ideas) – Adobe InDesign (uservoice.com). Check to see if there is a similar request there first. As you know, InDesign does provide ways to do the same thing already but I agree there are several steps to get there. Maybe there are some custom scripts?

I design a lot of trade books with smaller trim sizes (5.5 x 8.5, 6 x 9) and getting paragraphs to look good on small pages is not exactly intuitive at first. Before placing text, I set as default a "Justified Text Box" Object Style I've created with the Text Frame Options (Vertical Justification set to Justify Align) but with no paragraph spacing limit because that can cause conflicts with the Paragraph Style's Space Before and Space After settings I have established. Then, on chapter endings or pages where there isn't enough text to fill the page, I have to apply a "Top Text Box" Object Style. I also set Keep Lines Together to Start/End of Paragraph at 2 lines and use a No Break GREP style for widow control to 10 characters. The resulting text pages come out great. I've tried different ways in the past but I can count on this to align all full text pages to the exact same baseline based on my Master Page margins. I realize these are my InDesign habits which may not be the most efficient. I'd love to hear how others approach the same so we can learn from each other!

[Jim6C14]

Thanks Jain, and others. 
Your method works well for books who's pagination will not change after the first round of formatting. However, if the pagination does change (author wants to insert or delete some text), then there is a need to go back through the book and change two frame object styles at the end of every chapter. That's not a big job -- just an inconvenience.
It gets a bit trickier when a page has headings, sub-heads, bullets, etc . There are times when it's better to push a heading to the next page, leaving some space (para returns) at the bottom of the page. Then there is a need to judge by sight whether a page is loose or not. In the event of a pagination change, searching for, and changing object styles can become quite tedious.
I guess the main thing that would solve the problem would be to have the ability to set the maximum allowable leading in a paragraph style. Then all text frames could be vertically justified without fear of loose leading.

[J E L]

You are right, @Jim6C14. Once the pages shift it's not fun to go back through and reapply the object style and it does happen more than I like. I emphasize to authors that once their text comes out of Word into InDesign, significant text changes may incur additional cost so it's better to wait if they anticipate any. It's not always as simple as that, though, since I also make decisions in the layout process. I have encountered problems with subheading placements and so on but, to my eye, having a full text spread with extra empty space on one side and not on the other almost always looks unprofessional in a small trim size text-only trade book. There are always exceptions, of course. Not sure if you meant this but I don't recommend using extra paragraph returns to add space between text and headings or bullet sets to cause flow to the next page since the before/after spacing for each should be set in the separate paragraph styles or applied with that tool as needed. Anyway, it's a great discussion for me! I agree that a max leading option would be super to try out. I'm not sure why it's not offered in the first place. And there may be scripts to do this wonderfully that I haven't discovered yet.

[Peter Spier]

Instead of trying to mess with the leading, why not use the baseline grid and align text to that?

[J E L]

@Peter Spier AFAIK, you can only apply Align To Baseline Grid by directly selecting the text that you want to apply the alignment to first. That can work great for text in columns on one page and other short text applications. But in books with text boxes linked across hundreds of pages with several different paragraph styles applied throughout and pages where chapters end without a full page of text this doesn't work. But maybe I'm missing something?

[TᴀW]

"Align to baseline grid" (with it's various options) can be applied to text as part of a paragraph style as well.

[Peter Spier]

I recently finished the third edition of a book with hundreds of pages across multiple documents with the bulk of the paragraph styles set to align to grid.

[Peter Spier]

Further, while grid alignment, in my opinion, is best set as part of a style, it needn't be, and you don't have to select any text to use it. It's a paragraph attribute and it can be applied to a selected text frame, or to any paragraph that has an active cursor.

[J E L]

@Peter Spier Makes sense, thanks Peter.

[Jim6C14]

Peter, how would that work if the body text style had 14pt leading and a 7pt space after?  By snapping to grid, the 7pt space is not maintained, and if it was, then there would be another problem if the facing pages had a different (by an odd number) number of paragraphs. You would still need to spread those 7pts over the page (vert just). Is that not so?                                           

[Peter Spier]

It's true that you would lose the 7 pt spacing, but in my opinion the look of the pages would be improved.

[Jim6C14]

Yes, the look of the page might improve to some extent, but the 7pt inter-paragraph spacing might look better than a full 14pt space. I guess I still think the best solution would be to have a feature that would allow you to select the maximum allowable leading for styles that are vertically justified in a frame.

[Peter Spier]

Actually, you could set the grid to 7pts and things would work, but there is no guarantee that the last line would always fall at the bottom of the frame rather than on the next-to-last gridline, which I presume is what you are contending with now.

Personally, I find it extremely annoying, and I think a sign of amateur typesetting, when text does not align across adjacent columns or pages except when you have some sort of special case, such as a block quote, set in a different style. I would find your vertical justification with all that variable spacing very grating, and possibly more difficult to read.

[Jim6C14]

Going back to the way Ventura would have handled a 7 pt gap at the bottom of a page: if max leading adjustment for body text was set to, say, 5%, the leading of all the lines on a 40 line page would increase from, say, 15pt to 15.175 pts to fill the 7pt gap. The 7 pts would be spread evenly over 40 lines. It would not be noticable. Styles for block quotes, headings, etc would likely also be set for 5% allowable adjustment, which would not be noticable. Try vertically justifying an InDesign page that has a 7pt gap at the bottom of the page. The change in leading would, again, not be noticable.

I haven't tried TAW's V-justify add-on, but from its description, it sounds like space is added below or above paragraphs to achieve vertical justification. I think that method could possibly produce noticable gap differences between paragraphs seen on facing pages.

[OsakaWebbie]

Pardon me for resurrecting a four-year-old thread, but...

Instead of trying to mess with the leading, why not use the baseline grid and align text to that?

Because that wouldn't solve the problem of having the frame one line too short because of orphan rules. I'm here because of that issue. I'm using baseline grid for a magazine with multi-column articles, but in order to get the bottoms of columns to align, I frequently have to change wrapping on an image, squeeze a paragraph whose last line is short (to reduce it by a line), or stretch a paragraph whose last line is almost full (to make it one line longer). I accept that as necessary for the magazine, but now I'm designing a trilogy of 300-page paperback novels that my husband wrote, and I'm definitely NOT going to manually tweak every page like that. Currently I'm doing it without baseline grid, which allows us to easily tweak the paragraph styles (font size, leading, space above/below) for section headings, chapter titles, epigrams, etc., as we look over the books and see what we think of the appearance. I would hate to be locked into making the resulting height of all those elements always multiples of the grid.

I found this thread because I too would like to use vertical justification in Text Frame Options in a way that it would only stretch things if the frame is almost full. Perhaps irregularity in the bottom of the text on the pages is okay, but it's bothering me. It has been four years, so I don't know if InDesign has new options I'm not aware of. TAW's plugin is pricey and I prefer not to add plugins to software unless I have to, but I might need to consider it.

[Peter Spier]

@OsakaWebbie The only text that needs to align to the grid is the body copy. Headings, titles, etc can be whatever you like.

Quite frankly, it would bother the heck out of me if the two sides of a spread had different line spacing caused by using vertical justification. Seems to me that either tweaking line lengths or doing away with Keep Options to prevent single lines at top or bottom of a page are a fact of life in book layout.

[OsakaWebbie]

@Peter SpierThanks for the input.

"The only text that needs to align to the grid is the body copy. Headings, titles, etc can be whatever you like."

I know, but the sum of the non-grid content and its extra spacing has to be a multiple of the grid size (or ends up that way by force). So differing number of lines in section headers/epigrams and whether a header lands at the top of the page (where the Space Before is nullified) will cause the Space After to vary, sometimes enough to look sloppy. I fight this with the afore-mentioned magazine all the time, although there it's more noticeable due to having several headings on the same spread, which won't happen in the books.

"Quite frankly, it would bother the heck out of me if the two sides of a spread had different line spacing caused by using vertical justification."

Hmm, I thought it would be too subtle to notice, since it would be no more than the difference between 29 and 30 lines on the page. Survey question: Would it bother you less if the bottom of the two pages was left ragged? I won't have time to poll a bunch of readers with a bound proof copy (we are currently at risk of running out of time to get a proof copy at all before the release date my husband promised people, unless we just release the ebook and then release the paperback later), so I'll ask you as one voice for starters.

"Seems to me that either tweaking line lengths..."

For ~800 pages of book content, this is a non-starter. These books have a lot of dialogue and other shortish paragraphs, so there would be many, many such tweaks. I just don't have that kind of time. And just yesterday I learned that I'll need to revisit the cover design that I thought was done, and that's much more important, as it's the first thing people will see on sales sites and will be on the ebook as well as the paperback.

"...or doing away with Keep Options to prevent single lines at top or bottom of a page..."

Echoing your phrase, quite frankly it would bother the heck out of me to have widows, at least at the end of chapters or sections where they would really stand out. Orphans at the bottom of pages might not be so bad (as long as it's not the first line of a section, which is easy to prevent in my case because that's a different paragraph style due to not having a first-line indent) - it's against convention, but not so glaring. Allowing orphans in mid-section paragraphs would reduce the number of short page bottoms, but would not eliminate them.

[Peter Spier]

When I've done books I've tweaked the frame heights on adjacent pages in a spread from time to time to avoid widows and orphans. I think that's less obvious, since both pages continue to align to the gird, than to have uneven spacing on adjacent pages. I've also tweaked word spacing in small amounts to gain or lose a line.

I haven't had occasion to do a book of 800 pages, but I've done three editions of of one in the 500 page range, with appendices that were page after page of tables that should not split awkwardly across pages.

It's tedious, but in my opinion part of the job.

[OsakaWebbie]

I don't know if your tweaking of the frame height was changing the top or the bottom, but wouldn't that be functionally the same as leaving the frame height alone (with vertical justification being either Top or Bottom) and putting up with the opposite end not always being aligned? If a page only has 29 lines instead of 30 because of orphan/widow rules, either the top or bottom would not align. Making the frame shorter changes nothing, and making it taller to allow 31 lines instead of 29 still doesn't make it align with 30. I'm very familiar with tweaking word/character spacing to change the number of lines, but as I said, I have no time to be THAT professional, and my husband is also afraid of the ripple effect when things get edited later.

I just had a talk with him about it - it's handy that the author and the designer can just sit down in the same livingroom for a chat at any time. At first he felt like you, that differences in line spacing would be noticeable and distracting. But then he looked at actual books on his bookshelf. None of the books we found used a grid - the line spacing was allowed to vary slightly so that the top and bottom of the pages aligned. And he discovered that the variance didn't bother him like he thought it would. However, all the English books we found were non-fiction, and larger format than the 5"x8" trade paperback size we plan to use for his novels, so conventions might be different. We live in Japan where storage space is limited, so we threw out our collection of paperback novels years ago and just read on Kindle, but tomorrow I'll be passing near a bookstore that is large enough to possibly have a small English fiction section, so I'll stop in and take a look. We're also on the fence about font size and default leading (currently 11pt with 140% leading, but we might increase one or both slightly), so that will be a chance to see what others have done in that regard. Currently I'm favoring Garamond as the font - I like the open feel of its low h-height.

However, all this hand-wringing might not matter much in the end, as he is a self-published new author, so sales are likely to be almost all ebooks, not paperbacks.

[Peter Spier]

> I don't know if your tweaking of the frame height was changing the top or the bottom, but wouldn't that be functionally the same as leaving the frame height alone (with vertical justification being either Top or Bottom) and putting up with the opposite end not always being aligned? 

By tweaking the frame height I meant either lengthen or shorten BOTH frames on the spread to add or remove one line.  Sounds, though, like in your situation that might also be a problem since a 5X8 page doesn't give a lot of wiggle room and that extra line is a large percentage of page height, so far mor obvious than on a larger page.

In this situation I would probably live with the widows and orphans except for where it leaves only a line or two on the last page in a chapter. Page count to fit the signature size is going to be an issue here as well.

Since you have the luxury of easy consultation, why not make up two samples, one with vertical justification, and one with widows and orphans, and see which he prefers?

[TᴀW]

Just thought I'd mention my own V-Justify add-on (not free), as it helps vertically align pages. It is aware of chapter endings, so if text reflows, it would turn off vertical alignment for those as needed.

It does not offer an option for changing the leading though. Instead, it allows the user to specify max and min values of space before and space after for each paragraph style, and modifies those values to achieve full justification.

Also, it does have an option to (additionally) employ InDesign's own vertical justification mode, which does modify leading, and, as mentioned, will switch full justification off at chapter endings.

https://www.id-extras.com/products/vertical-justification/

Ariel