Text highlights when I use full justified or Justified with last line rag

[mizspresso]

I just tried changing the justification on some text from Left Justified to Full Justified. When I did that 80% of the selected text shows up hightlighted! I have never encountered this, nor do I know how to remove the highlighting. This is true with all three flavors of justification.

Anybody know about this?

[Migintosh · Accepted solution]

If you switch to Preview Mode (View>Screen Mode>Preview, or tap the W key when no text is selected), does the highlight go away? If so, check to see if InDesign>Preferences>Composition has anything checked (could be H&J Violations). If that's the case, it won't print, and is just InDesign telling you something.

[mizspresso]

Thanks, that was it.  Which brings up another question; is there a way to set rules for hyphenation? If my text violates H&Js I hope there is a way to control that hyphenation.

[Migintosh]

When you force justify type, the spacing is changed dynamically, based on the available space in the text frame. In this screen shot:

…I have the same type in all three frames. The top is Left aligned, and the others are full-justified. The settings in the lowest frame for Justification (part of the paragraph style) have a larger maximum-allowed spacing, so there's no warning on the lower frame with the same text as the middle one. But, if I change the geometry of the text frame, like this:

…the combination of letters that make up each word are distributed in a way that different words fit into different lines, which require different spacing between words, and other opportunities for full-justify to space those words in the given area. So, the lines where the maximum space is larger than the maximum setting will trip the warning highlight, but you wouldn't know if you didn't have the warning highlight set to show violations.

Does that help?

[Jongware]

Noteworthy to add: unless your text is extremely even (repetitions of "a a a a a"...), the settings are "violated". It's not an error but only an indication – of by how much the word spacing needed shrinking or expanding to justify the text. In other words, there is no justification possible without changing space widths. (Not 100% true as there is another way: you can make InDesign change the horizontal scale of individual characters. But that's only circumventing the letter of the rule, rather than the intention.)

If seeing those yellow highlights really bothers you, switch them off or alter the Justification Settings. Your text and spacing won't change (by much) but they may no longer be considered "too much".