I am going mad - Indesign kerning

[brucenz]

As a designer who has picked up Indesign CS3 as I went along my new boss wants me to do more work on kerning text. We were doing a 2 sided newsletter on a landscape A4 this week. With 2 folds on each page (3 columns) I had one image per column and the customer wanted full justification around the image, a square photo. Because there was a lot of text the justification would force 2 to 3 words on a line and put a ton of space between words e.g.

The cat ran
to the big dog

I spent 4 hours trying to persaude text on the next line to go up as there was space and all that happened was the text bounced back and forth.

Can someone please please please tell me how to stop the text from doing this so I have total control over how much text is justified onto each line.

Many thanks
Bruce :eek:

[urstwile]

Try switching to Adobe Single-Line composer in the justification dialog.

[Two-Toe Tom]

you could always put a hard return after each line and have each line full justified

[D-Frag]

also play around with the text wrap guides. sometimes you can knock it in like a .002 and it will get your text to jump up.

also, put your cursor between the text you want to line up, hold down Alt then press your arrow keys left or right, this will adjust the space between your letters.

[longboy]

Try switching to Adobe Single-Line composer in the justification dialog.

x2 on this. It is set in ID as Paragraph Composer as default. Single Line allows you to track lines individually.

[brucenz]

Try switching to Adobe Single-Line composer in the justification dialog.
thanks but it didn't work

[urstwile]

Hmm, can you post a screenshot of what's happening?

[longboy]

...and post how you're doing the kerning/tracking. I assume you're highlighting all of a line of text, plus the word you'd like to move up?

In my InDesign documents, I make sure that ALL of my paragraphs are set up as single line composer. I got so used to tracking all lines of documents very quickly, that I still prefer to do it manually vs. letting Indy try it.

[Clark]

Are you using paragraph styles for this? Or not using style guides?

[tZ]

hyphenate? – that would be the easy way. You might want to take a cold shower after but, it should get the job done. Theres always option+arrow if you fairly confident in your own tracking and kerning. However, you might want to make it known to your employer that the manual approach will take time and if the copy is changed it will need to redone (most likely.)

[Clark]

or simply make the image smaller? It's always unwise to wrap text around small images when using columns, as it looks a little untidy. especially with full justification...

[benjo]

Place the image between columns. This will break up the wrap.

[mojoprime]

you can go into the paragraph palette and adjust the hyphenation exceptions. be very careful as you can make your text quite unreadable or terribly blown out, but that's another way.

[chris82]

I think you can change this my uncheckin the "keep options" in the paragraph tab.

[urstwile]

I was wondering if that was possibly what was going on as well, chris82. Which is why a screenshot would be extremely helpful. :)