Fixing word spacing problem with no hyphenation

Without hyphenation, it’s very hard to justify text well. Perhaps you should use left-aligned paragraphs instead?
If you want to tweak the spacing, see this post:
https://creativepro.com/what-are-your-favorite-word-and-character-space-settings-for-hjs.php

Your request is contradicting common logic :)

Here is why.
#1. You want your text evenly spaced out, to have it justified left and right.
#2. You do not want smaller and larger spaces.

To comply to #1, every line that does not entirely fill from margin to margin MUST have some additional space left (the “common logic” part), to be distributed along that same line. But doing so immediately violates #2!

Fortunately, the thing you complain about – word spacing – is not the only option InDesign has to fill out text. Here are a couple of options you can try (and then reject – please DO read on after this list!).

a. Rewrite the text, filling each line with just enough words to comply to both #1 and #2. This is not that unusual; as Donald Knuth quotes from George Bernard Shaw, “.. ‘In his own works, whenever [William Morris] found a line that justified awkwardly, he altered the wording solely for the sake of making it look well in print” (“Breaking Paragraphs into Lines”, Software—Practice and Experience, Vol. 11 (1981)).

b. Adjust the Justification to allow less divergent Word Spacing. The default is 80/100/133; change to 100/100/100, and change the Letter Spacing to -10/0/20. This will distribute the space between the letters of the words instead of between the spaces.

c. Adjust the Justification to allow less Word Spacing as above, but leave the Letter Spacing as it is and change the Glyph Scaling.

d. Adjust the type size of each line.

For what reasons should you not use *any* of these solutions? Each of them, on their own or in combination, may do what you are asking. However,

(a) is usually out, unless you are formatting your own text. And even then you wouldn’t want to rewrite a mellifluous phrase to something less good, just to have it *look* better.

(b) is usually out, because a Worst Case Scenario is where the *letter* spacing is as large or larger than the *word* spacing. According to these rules, a phrase may appear “s p a c e d t h i s w i d e”.

(c) is sort of frowned upon. Yes, ID will comply, and you will get stretchy and shrinky lines of text, but it looks pretty awful. I see I have “100/100/100” in my own default settings, but it’s entirely possible I changed them long ago, because I seem to remember the actual defaults are something like 98/100/102.

(d) may work very well for a poster – but not for running text.

So what *is* the “proper” solution? There are only TWO reasonable solutions: either allow hyphenation, or do not justify at all.

So, that’s that? No! There is something additionally strange going on with your example. With common justification settings – it’s safe to state you most likely did not change them –, the single word “The” ought to have appeared at the end of your top line. The only reason why it would not have done so is because you used a Forced Line Break (Shift+Return) at the end of that first line, and in that case, hyphenation or not, InDesign has no choice BUT to obey you and fully justify that line. If you did this here: don’t. Either end a line with a space – and give InDesign a fighting chance to properly justify the text as good as your settings allow it – or, if the next line indeed must start a new paragraph, use a simple Return at the end.

(Disclaimer: I am heavily biased against people who are “against” hyphenation. It is a common complaint it would hinder readability – but at the same time, these people want “good looking text” as well! I say, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. No-hyphens is great for a children’s book, but proper hyphenation is perfectly normal to find in every text targeted to, oh, something like ten years and older.

As I am Dutch, I frequently hear from my clients that “the hyphenation looks plain wrong”. My usual retort to that is that they are assessing English hyphenated words with their Dutch eyes; and the Dutch system of breaking words is rather different from the English one. It’s very rare to find ID’s hyphenation algorithm fail on English text. Even when they insist to break a word “wrong”, I flat out refuse to do so and opt to NOT break the offending word at all.)

Michael, while searching for the proper terms I ran across this web page: https://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1924553&seqNum=6

It’s an entire chapter from Real World Adobe InDesign CS6 (by some David Blatner, together with Olav Kvern and Robert Bringhurst), and it discusses the most important basics of working with paragraphs. Near the end there is a section “Multi-Line Composition”, which discusses your problem in detail – up to including the very same solutions as I did …

Do read it – that particular section, but preferable the entire article. And if you like, buy it! there are 840 more such pages in the entire book.