Comments on: When to Use Balance Ragged Lines

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:23:32 +0000

It made me giggle that the title of this article had a widow.

p.s. I learned a lot from your lynda.com videos … thanks!

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:13:13 +0000

Jim, I completely agree. I talk about your point exactly in podcast 112. (Should be up today or tomorrow.)

By: Jim L

Jim L — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:45:40 +0000

I think it was in Words to Type that I learned about breaking according to content. In the second example I would break the line after make so the word it stays next to easy. New would stay next to goodies. Sometimes I read a paragraph to myself with a double pause at the end of the line, certain phrases and rhythms will feel more awkward split. The, that, a, an, feel better with the noun they belong to. People read words and groups of words, the shape of the copy block is less important relative to the meaning. Also, in the first example the balance ragged lines has added two hyphens. Hyphenation for flush left text is almost never necessary, at least the setting should be 3 characters before and after each hyphen. Maybe that could be a typographers bumper sticker "I break for content."

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:39:10 +0000

Thanks, Mona, for mentioning that it can be applied in a style sheet — you’ve saved me from grotting around in INDD looking for the option. We have quite a few newbie typesetters, and I often find myself asking them to rejig subheads to fix the bad visuals on too-short second lines. I’ll try adding it to our three subhead stylesheets and see how we get on.

On a related topic: how about a post on getting the most out of vertically balancing text in two columns, especially with a graphic in one or the other column (or, as often for pull quotes, straddling the alley).

By: Mona Good

Mona Good — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:52:16 +0000

Playing with both BRL and Hyphenation allows quick and non-destructive experimentation to find a good solution for blocks of text. So much better than adding forced returns which may have to be removed if they don’t work and could come back to bite you if the copy reflows. I find that it gives me satisfactory results about 99% of the time.

BRL is even great with single lines of text that may have something like an em dash, quote mark, or other “unbalanced” character coming at the beginning or end of the line, and the copy has to be aligned with another element. If you need lots of text frames doing this, save BRL in your paragraph style, and add the paragraph style to an object style.

By: Jeremy Schultz

Jeremy Schultz — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:20:18 +0000

I’ve always been satisfied with the BRL feature, but I use it the most on two-line headlines—the second line is often much shorter than the first and I like to balance them out.

Jeremy

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:30:12 +0000

Bullet points … good one! Also numbered step-by-steps.

One of the neatest things about Balance Ragged Lines is that it works like the Paragraph Composer … as you edit text or change the frame width, the command “keeps applying itself.” It’s cool to see it re-break lines on the fly, always keeping the lines balanced.

It’s also worth noting that you can enable Balance Ragged Lines in a paragraph style. Look for the checkbox in the Indents and Spacing panel.

For example, when you’re creating a Pull Quote paragraph style, if you want the pull quote to be centered (as shown above), you might as well turn on Balance Ragged Lines in the style definition, it’ll save you a lot of tedious work.

By: lowJackson

lowJackson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:41:11 +0000

Hmm, I’d like a slider on this feature, its either too much or too little when I use it – however I do use it a lot on bullet points, especially when they span 2 lines.

By: Alexandre Giesbrecht

Alexandre Giesbrecht — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:45:55 +0000

Usually I’m happy with the results, but when I use it I rarely leave hyphenation on.

By: Geert

Geert — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:31:19 +0000

Very good examples. Every text editor should have this feature.