7 Replies Latest reply: Sep 25, 2012 8:14 AM by P Spier RSS

    Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style

    Olfar Community Member

      to be able to have "paragraph spacing limit above" and "paragraph spacing limit below" for the particular paragraph style.

        • 1. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
          P Spier CommunityMVP

          Can you explain what this means?

          • 2. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
            Olfar Community Member

            In page layout, vertical justification is used to align columns of text evenly.

             

            Imagine that you must do the layout and composition of  a Shakespeare's play

            and on every text frame you have only three kinds of paragraphs style:

            1) person

            3) didascalia

            2) text of play

            1) person

            . . . etc.

             

            You have to use vertical justification to align columns evenly, but you can only reduce or add the space before "person" (0-2 pt) and space below "dida" (max 1 pt) and  nothing else. You must not change line spacing at all.

             

            Now it is time-consuming manual job.

             

            As I remember Ventura 2.0 had simple but similar option near 20 years ago.

             

            Now vertical justification is an option of text frame, for me there should be an option of paragraph style too.  Not only for every paragraph as is now, but for every paragraph style you want.

            • 3. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
              P Spier CommunityMVP

              While you can't currently set maximum and minimum amounts to increase paragraph spacing on a per-paragraph or perstyle basis, you can set an overall value for maiximum space that applies to all inter-paragraph spaces. If you set it sufficiently large, there will be no change to the line spacing within a paragraph. You can even use ti to top align one paragraph and bottom align a second paragraph in one frame.

               

              I'm not a fan of vertically justified text, myself. I prefer to see text aligned to a baseline grid in columnar or long runnng text. That's very easy to achieve using styles.

              • 4. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
                Olfar Community Member

                No you can't use such kind of method in poems and drama where every line is a one paragraph.

                You must only change the space between particular paragraph style for example you can add or reduce the space before the dramatics personae

                 

                I'm not a fan of vertically justified text too. But there are some kinds of difficult publications whrere you must use it, because your publisher want it.

                And beleve me automatic justification build in InDesign is not a solution.

                • 5. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
                  P Spier CommunityMVP

                  I've never set a play, so have no experience with that. Are you saying the various paragraphs need to be clustered by styles, and that you want to change the spacing between the clusters to acheive the justifications? That's beyond ID's current capabilities other than through tedious trickery using anchored objects, I think, but if the spacing between paragraphs can be even regardless of style, just set the maximum paragraph space to some huge number.

                  • 6. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
                    Richard Groff Community Member

                    I'm with you, Olfarr. I'd love to see ID with vertical justification controls in paragraph styles. I do a lot of book pagination with complicated layouts. Using the baseline grid rarely works well. To be able to designate that extra space up to, say, 1 pica can be inserted above Head A, 6 points above Head B, and none above Text (or perhaps percentages could be used) would make aligning the bottom of pages a whole lot easier. Currently, I have to insert extra space above heads manually, which then causes problems later when text is deleted or added.

                    • 7. Re: Vertical justification (below and above) as the option of paragraph style
                      P Spier CommunityMVP

                      Please don't think I'm not in favor of this addition, I just want to clarify what's being asked and make sure that the existing feature can't do it becasue nobody wants to wait if we can figure out a way to accomplish the task now. That's what this forum is all about. Official feature requests should be submited onthe web form here: Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

                       

                      Those submissions do get read, but the chances for adoption are greatly imporved if you can clearly explain what you want to do, and provide a business case for how it will help users. The more users who are likely to benefit, the better the cahnce the feature will be added at some point. I don't like to be a pessimist, but I don't see this as a really high priority when you consider how little attention other long-doc features like footnotes have received.