What is the best practice with spacing paragraphs

[Aidan28610574w1n9]

Should I space paragraphs using space above and space below, or should I do it using the space bar?

What do you guys recommend

[Rene Andritsch]

The space bar creates a space between characters or words. Space above and below are good options.

[Peter Spier]

The correct way to create sapce between paragraphs is to use sapce above or below. Using the Return/Enter key to create a blank paragraph can result in unwanted blank gaps at the top of a column.

[rob day · Accepted solution]

The best practice is Space Above and Below applied with Paragraph Styles, then you can make changes globally when you change your mind about the spacing later. Same goes for Indents—don’t use tabs or other white spaces.

[Aidan28610574w1n9]

thanks

and if my text is 12pt , what should my spacing be? any thoughts

[rob day]

Line spacing is Leading in InDesign—Leading is the distance from the line’s baseline to the base line of the line above.

Space Below adds an amount to the next paragraph’s leading and any Space Above amount, so here the distance between the paragraph’s baselines is 28.5pts (15pt leading + 13.5 space below):

[Rene Andritsch]

@Aidan28610574w1n9 There are no general rules for the amount of leading. This depends a lot of the line length. The longer the line, the bigger the amount of leading. The text should be easy to follow with the eye from one line to the next. The best is to try different values, print it out and judge with your eyes. Also to tight the text will look too “dark”. To lose and your lines will fall apart.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The answers to use Space Above and Space Below are correct — using extra paragraph returns or "soft returns" is a very poor practice even in apps like Word. Learn to use spacing above, below, and line-height to your layout's best advantage, both "looks" and esthetics and fitting text to pages.

The next step in this is using spacing to control multiple paragraph styles, such as a heading, over intro text, over a subheading, over body text, with bullets in the midst... you get the idea. It's okay to use any combination of spacing above and below, but using precise multiples to get a clean, consistent look should be a goal. I try to use ONLY space above; that is, X amount of space above each style and zero extra space below. This makes it easier to adjust layouts as you develop a document, and you don't run into spacing collapse and combination issues when there is spacing below one style and above the next. (That isn't necessarily wrong, or even poor practice, but if you can get in the habit of using only one spacing, doc maintenance gets a lot simpler.)