Posts Tagged with ‘vertical justification’

InDesign CS5 really helps us keep our balance (and sanity). Working with vertically justified column text in the past (InDesign CS4 and earlier) has been a painful balancing act.

Michael wrote: I’m using the Baseline Grid to keep the lines aligned between verso/recto pages, but with my keep options turned off I get orphaned/widowed lines every once in a while. Turning on Keep Options fixes the orphan/widow problem, but makes it so that every once in a while I get one page one or two lines shorter than than the one next to it. While the orphans & widows are typographically annoying, I think the uneven page endings look careless and unprofessional (especially when the difference is two lines).

There’s a third option that I tried: If I set the master text frames to be “vertically justified”, the top and bottom lines always line up, and I can set the keep options to get rid of widows and orphans. The problem with this is that it ignores the leading and gives uneven baselines across the spread, which looks odd when printed out. So my question is this: What do I do?

You know that old one-liner: “Fast, good, or cheap: pick any two”? It’s kind of like that. Unfortunately, there is no great answer to this, but here’s one thing you might want to try…