Give a Little Air to the Editors

Anne-Marie Concepcion

8

Here’s an interesting tip I thought some of you could use. A few clients of mine have their designers routinely extend text frame depth into white space below (below the point where they actually prefer the text to end), sometimes into the pasteboard. Then they use ruler guides to show the editors where the text should optimally end.

So, instead of handing the editors a text frame like this one (text frame is green, margin is magenta, bottom trim edge is the heavy black rule):

They make the text frame extra deep, like so:

The advantage is that it gives the editors some leeway on how far down the copy is allowed to appear without having to bug the designers all the time to adjust the frames “just one more line deep.”

In the example above, the ideal situation (to the layout designer) is that the last line of text aligns with the bottom of the picture to the right—and they’re communicating that to InCopy users by placing the light blue guideline there (one of my clients uses specially-colored orange guidelines for this purpose). But, there’s nothing really objectionable to anyone if the editor needs to include two or three more lines of text, since it would still end above the margin.

Notice that in this case—the second screen shot above—the designer was extra-generous and extended the text frame a couple lines below the bottom margin. That’s because his editors prefer to edit overset text in Layout view when possible. They can plonk in all the text they want, format it and see how it looks in Layout view, then copyfit visually to the blue ruler guide or to the magenta margin guide.

The disadvantage to this technique is that writers can’t rely on the Copyfit Progress toolbar for these extra-deep frames. (That’s the toolbar that says how many lines you’re over or under for the active story.) Since CP’s reporting relies on the height of the text frame, it would always report that you’re “Under 4 lines” or whatever, even if the copy is right at the bottom margin.

Nonetheless you might consider such a solution, even on a case-by-case basis, if the issue of “just one more line deep, please” crops up a lot in your workflow.