Gahlord

Right on, put it with the word count stuff as long as I can see what the paragraph measure is for the text block while I adjust it's size I really don't mind one way or the other.

Average for selected text could be nice. But truly I was thinking averaged out for a given and selected Text Frame. In practice, I set up a text frame and then want to make it readable by getting the sense of the measure of the paragraphs within that text frame. Most often, I make adjustments either by changing the width of the frame or adjusting the size of the text. I never really care about the paragraph measure on a single line of text, only in blocks of text because I usually care about paragraph measure in relation to readability of a lengthy text. If I could quickly see what the paragraph measure was, on average, for all the paragraphs in a given text frame, I'd know how wide to make the text frame and/or how I might adjust the size or other characteristics of the type. I think having it display in characters or words is fine either way. I use words and I suspect most people who actually care about paragraph measure do as well. But characters is rad too and I could learn to adjust. Or it could be a setting somewhere. I would see paragraph measure as an attribute of an individual text frame (a function of typeface attributes like size and the width of the text frame itself). There may be several text frames on a page, each with different measures (main text and sidebar text, for example). I usually think of word count or character count as attributes of an entire document. The average paragraph measure of an entire document wouldn't be very useful for me, I don't think I would ever use it to make design decisions. But I would use paragraph measure to make design decisions about individual text frames.

In addition to a Shetland pony, I would love have an information readout attached to the text box in Publisher that would show me the paragraph measure (number of words per line) of that text box. Spitballing here but something that would: For lines that have words in them 1. Count the number of words. 2. Average the number of words vs the lines that have words in them. 3. Display that number somewhere I can see it while I jiggle the handle, like the toolbar thingie. In a fairly lengthy meeting, you could have a heated discussion about whether the calculation should be performed before the auto-linebreaks and assign some sort of decimal weighting based on the overhang of the words that break the line or whether the calculation should be performed after the auto-linebreaks because that's what users see anyway. Either of these options would be fine with me, I would happily get the coffee and pastries from the kitchen to make sure no one dies of malnourishment during the meeting. This feature would help me make nice readable blocks of text. Or dense impenetrable text when I'm feeling mean.

Makes sense, my copy of Mrs Eaves is Type 1. Man I'm old.

Updating this for others that may be experiencing trouble with PDF export on Mac: I can export a PDF if: I choose whichever PDF preset I want to be using Click "More" In the panel of options under under "Embed Fonts" use the pulldown to select "Text as Curves" Click "Close" (don't worry, your settings will hold) Click "Export" My guess? There's something wonky in the way Publisher is handling Font Embedding and that wonkiness disappears once you get rid of fonts by making them outlines. Fonts used in my document are: Basic Sans Narrow, Basic Sans Narrow Alt, Mrs Eaves, Mrs Eaves Just Ligatures. Not too much text overall, maybe 800 words tops. It's an LP jacket design. I think this workaround will be ok for print applications (I'll let you know once I run a press job with it). For other applications there may be some non-optimal repercussions (for example, the text in your PDF won't be readable by machines). Your mileage may vary.

I am having this issue as well. I currently have only been successful if choose the "flatten" preset.