Unexpected rivers only on the few top lines

[Chris P. Bacon]

In theory the wider the columns, the better justification should work.
So I made an experiment to create only one column and I got huge rivers but only for the top rows.
How can this be explained?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, I'm looking at that drop cap, for starters.

You have hyphenation on, okay. Try applying a gentle text squeeze to the top line, then the top two, and possibly all three. A few percent tighter tracking, or a few percent text width, or a combination.

It's not always possible to figure out the why when you are doing combination layouts like this, but gentle fixes often get around such issues.

—

[Peter Spier]

I would also say the drop cap is probably the culprit.

In addition to tracking the entire paragraph you can kern just the spaces for selected text. I use this a lot to tighten or loosen word spacing without changing the kerning between the letters in the words, which I think looks better. I don't know a menu command to do this, but the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl (Cmd) + Alt (Opt) + Backspace or \ (backslash) will tighten or loosen just the spaces +/- 10 respectively each time you apply them. It doesn't always work, but it's usually the first thing I try for adjusting lines.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I wanted to recreate the issue and i couldn't, now I get no rivers with one column. No idea why.

[Peter Spier]

Did you change anything in the text at all? The Adobe Paragraph composers can and will make drastic changes depending on the actual text.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I don't know what caused it and i couldn't recreate the issue. I just tought someone has seen this before and it's some known thing.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

It looks like there are line breaks (shift-returns) at the end of each line. Turn on your hidden characters to check.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Thanks I will if I can recreate the issue, now it's gone since I have changed my columns and many settings every minute.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I will if I can recreate the issue.