Participant

Question

Requested InDesign function: vertically justify text in all page frames

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
June 24, 2021
5 replies
2103 views

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?

Feature request

TᴀW

Legend

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

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Peter Spier

Community Expert

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

OsakaWebbie

Inspiring

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

Community Expert

@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.

J E L

Community Expert

@Jim6C1418070177 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!

J

Jim6C1418070177Author

Participant

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

Community Expert

You are right, @Jim6C1418070177. 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.

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

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

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

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.

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