Comments on: Adjusting Word Spacing From the Keyboard

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:31:37 +0000

@karin, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that has anything to do with this blog post. Try clicking on Forums at the top of the page and posting there?

By: karin

karin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:22:56 +0000

i have plenty of white frames – around images with and without trasparency – and all my text! I can’t see any of it on my PC, but depending on what kind of mac I open the PDF, it gets wors. Sometimes I can’t see the text at all – leopard is really bad. It is supposed to be an on screen presentation – so I could not care less on how it prints. I am really desperate and have no idea how I could solve tis issue. Please help!

By: Nadya Miloserdova

Nadya Miloserdova — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:09:30 +0000

To the previous author:
Sorry, your comments turned into a sequence of (?????) question marks.
Try differerent encoding.

By: Jonathan Mayer

Jonathan Mayer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:16:35 +0000

Thanks, Anne-Marie. I was wrangling with a similar couple of paragraphs about a month ago, and I wish I had taken advantage of this option then. But I know I’ll be using this soon enough. It’s the frequency at which you post this sort of in-the-trenches discovery that really places this site head-and-shoulders above so many others!

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:33:06 +0000

Wow! I wish I would have known about this the last couple of years. I deal with this type of client all the time in ad work and also in the editorial part of the magazine that I assist in. I always ended up reverting to kerning in the whole section of type, of course it ended up being something like -35 which is on the threshold.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:51:49 +0000

Sorry, guys — my mistake!

I just checked and turning off Paragraph Composer does indeed alter the line breaks sometimes.

It seems odd that it works this way. I’d rather “Paragraph Composer” be a button that you press, rather than a fixed setting. When you press the button, it helps you out with the selected text (or text boxes), then hands control back to you.

Anyway, it never seems to be a problem for me to get it to look fine manually pretty quickly. I do it without thinking.

Just to clarify, I never turn Paragraph Composer off in any kind of preferences — only for individual paragraphs that I want to tweak.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:06:44 +0000

Also, Lee, the simple act of switching to the Single Line Composer very often changes the line breaks– more than 80% of the time in my experience — even before you touch a single thing. (If it didn’t, I too would often switch to it toward the end of a project, just to get full control over final line break tweaks.)

I’m not sure why your experience is different. I’m assuming it’s a peculiar combination of your paragraph style settings and the length of words/column widths you most commonly deal with in your projects.

But if you drag out an empty frame that’s two or three inches wide and fill it with placeholder text, and the text is styled with the default Basic Paragraph style, switching to Single-Line composer will most likely change a line break or two … especially if you make the paragraphs fully justified. (Though it happens with left-justified too.)

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:50:24 +0000

Lee, the benefit of Paragraph Composer is that you have to do much less manual tweaking and you tend to get a more even color across the paragraph than you do with single-line composer. Check out this wonderful quote. On the other hand, you're right: Para Composer can be a real pain if you're trying to get a line "just right" by hand. There's nothing wrong with turning it off; but I would argue that you should leave it on most of the time.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:20:28 +0000

I never hesitate to turn Composer off if I want to change something manually. When you turn it off, everything stays exactly as Composer left it, apart from you’re free to make your own changes.

I don’t really see why everyone is so keen to leave Composer turned on? It only takes a few seconds to check over a paragraph and get it looking right manually (as we had to do every time back in the Quark days).

Or am I missing something?

By: Alexandre Giesbrecht

Alexandre Giesbrecht — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:52:45 +0000

This IS an excellent tip! I just hope I remember it the next time I need — you know, you never need it until you forget about it…