Adjusting type in a book layout to fall evenly on margin

[Omega G]

I am formatting a novel using Affinity Publisher. I'M IN LOVE!! But here's my question. I have margins set up, font at 12 pt, leading at 14, no indents, rather, using a hard return after each paragraph and quotation. How do I adjust my type on each page to allow it to rest directly on the bottom margin evenly on each page? I don't see a setting for kerning. Is there a setting that will adjust each page to snap to the lower margin and adjust the type automatically? Some pages just work, others fall quite a bit above the bottom margin, others just slightly below. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 🙂

 

Edited April 1, 2020 by Omega G
more specific question to explain problem

[John Rostron]

@Omega G, 

2 hours ago, Omega G said:

Any help would be greatly appreciated

You are more likely to get help if you used a meaningful title for your post, such as: How do I allow text to rest directly on the bottom margin evenly on each page?

John

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Omega G said:

I don't see a setting for kerning. Is there a setting that will adjust each page to snap to the lower margin and adjust the type automatically? Some pages just work, others fall quite a bit above the bottom margin, others just slightly below. 

First, welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

One comment: Kerning is spacing between a pair of letters on a line, so I don't think it is relevant to your issue.

If I understand your problem I think you should investigate the Baseline Grid settings. Here's the Help page: https://affinity.help/publisher/English.lproj/pages/DesignAids/baselineGrids.html

But even that might not work. You might also need to look at the Text Flow settings in your Paragraph Text Style (or the Paragraph studio panel). In general, though, books are not laid out so that the last line of each page is exactly on the margin. Certainly no lines should reside within the margin. But often the space just above the margin will be blank because generally publishers won't end a page with the first line of a multi-line paragraph. If they can't fit at least two lines of the paragraph they'll move the entire paragraph to the next page. That may be what's happening to you. Here's the Wikipedia page on Widows and Orphans, which explains the terminology. The Flow options in a Publisher Text Style have settings for both orphan and widow prevention, which you may need to adjust.

[Omega G]

Thank you Walt! I looked at several books at first, and in all of them the last line of type lines up evenly on the bottom margin of each page. I was aware of widows and orphans, and to my amazement, many of the books I looked at on my bookshelf had them! I did set those parameters in the paragraph window, but for some reason it did nothing. I still had both widows and orphaned lines in my text. This is my first time using AP, so I am sure I did something wrong when setting it. From what I gleaned on Google, it's just something you have to do page by page, adjusting letter and line spacing by hand. Ugh.... I was hoping this wonderful program had a button to click that would just do it for me! 🙂

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Omega G said:

... I was hoping this wonderful program had a button to click that would just do it for me! 🙂

 

I think it should work automatically, so perhaps you have something that's not set properly.

If you have a sample .afpub document we can look at it for you.

[Old Bruce]

On 3/31/2020 at 10:00 PM, Omega G said:

But here's my question. I have margins set up, font at 12 pt, leading at 14, no indents, rather, using a hard return after each paragraph and quotation. How do I adjust my type on each page to allow it to rest directly on the bottom margin evenly on each page? I

I use Text Frames with a base line and Paragraph Styles which use the Align to Baseline in the Baseline Grid. 

Take a look at this file, pay attention to the Text Frames on the Master Page and the settings in the two Paragraph styles Base and Basic Paragraph.

test for page bottom.afpub

[Omega G]

Old Bruce, you have SAVED THE DAY! Thank you so much!! Your suggestion worked like a charm and was exactly what I was looking for! However, for most pages I am selecting "justify vertically" so the type is aligned at both the top and bottom margin. And on my last page before a new chapter I am selecting a top margin alignment. I am still having a bit of trouble on my new chapter pages for the top of the text frame to align with a guide I have placed under the  chapter number headline. For some reason it will not allow me to place the top of the text frame where I want it, but rather snaps to a point too far above or too far below the guide. I have messed with the "snap" options, but none seem to help. But as long as it is close, I am not going to split hairs on it. The reader will not notice from one chapter beginning to another if it is slightly off. Unless they are OCD about that sort of thing like me! LOL

Thank you for your help!

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Omega G said:

However, for most pages I am selecting "justify vertically" so the type is aligned at both the top and bottom margin.

I don't think I've ever seen a book that does that. It may be a surprise to your readers

[Omega G]

I don't think so. Literally every book on my bookshelf is that way.

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Omega G said:

I don't think so. Literally every book on my bookshelf is that way.

And none of mine are, that I know of, except possibly books of very short poetry. And I've probably got close to 5000 books.

For normal books with paragraphs and a lot of text on each page, vertical justification would (I think) give uneven amounts of space between lines or paragraphs on successive pages, which would be visually disturbing. I think I would have noticed if it were a common practice, at least in books I've seen

What kind of books do you read? Perhaps I just haven't seen any like you have.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

For normal books with paragraphs and a lot of text on each page, vertical justification would (I think) give uneven amounts of space between lines or paragraphs on successive pages, which would be visually disturbing.

I think you are right about that, so I wonder if the OP is thinking about something other than vertical justification.

[GarryP]

There could be a chance that the OP is getting the use of a baseline grid mixed up with justifying text vertically.
In other words, they could be trying to justify the text rather than using the baseline grid, which is a more ‘usual’ method of doing what I think they want.

[Omega G]

Actually, all of the genres on my shelf are justified top/bottom and left/right. I understand your observation about too much space between the lines when justifying the body copy, however, the difference is so imperceptible I don't think a reader would even notice. I measured baseline to baseline from one page to the next and the difference is almost nil. One other problem I am having with justification, however, is when it tries to justify a line and the words    look    like   this,    all     spaced     out.  How do I fix that?

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Omega G said:

One other problem I am having with justification, however, is when it tries to justify a line and the words    look    like   this,    all     spaced     out.  How do I fix that?

Do you have hyphenation turned on?

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Omega G said:

One other problem I am having with justification, however, is when it tries to justify a line and the words    look    like   this,    all     spaced     out.  How do I fix that?

First, you probably want to have Justify Left set, not Justify All, for your paragraphs. If that doesn't do it, and enabling hyphenation wasn't the answer,  it would help to have a small sample document showing the problem.

[Wosven]

Usually, you always have the same number of lines per pages, and text is align to the grid, not vertically. It flows better with long paragraphs, and need some work when they are short. By transparency, you should be able to check this in a book (same amount of lines).

Last time, with a book with shorter paragraphs, I use a new layer with a colourfull rectangle on the bottom margin that I can display/hide easily on all the pages, to check that all pages had lines to the bottom, since modifying text can be tricky if it set to no widows and orphans.

The only book I saw with vertical align was one of 1000+small pages, and the trick was to set a really small leading (±1/4 of the character usual leading, for example, if the character was set to 12 pts, the leading was set to 3 or 4 pts). There were few lines per pages and a small space between paragraphs too.

[Rodi]

On 4/1/2020 at 5:15 PM, Omega G said:

Thank you Walt! I looked at several books at first, and in all of them the last line of type lines up evenly on the bottom margin of each page. I was aware of widows and orphans, and to my amazement, many of the books I looked at on my bookshelf had them! I did set those parameters in the paragraph window, but for some reason it did nothing. I still had both widows and orphaned lines in my text. This is my first time using AP, so I am sure I did something wrong when setting it. From what I gleaned on Google, it's just something you have to do page by page, adjusting letter and line spacing by hand. Ugh.... I was hoping this wonderful program had a button to click that would just do it for me! 🙂

 

Here is a classic issue, you have uneven line spacing at the page level because you have unequal text flowing! Oh, terrible! 

It's a classic issue that can be easily fixed. Bottom text align. Go to "View - studio - Text Frame - Verticle align "bottom." Now your bottoms will align, your tops, not so much! Another workaround would be to make folios set at bottom, and just let the text flow.

[R C-R]

32 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Usually, you always have the same number of lines per pages...

I checked several novels from my bookshelf & the last page at the ends of chapters almost never has the same number of lines as the other pages. Those pages appear to have the same leading as the other pages in the chapter, so if they were justified vertically wouldn't that spread the lines out vertically to cover the entire page, creating large gaps between the lines?

[Wosven]

Books are different than articles, where you can rewrite and shorten text to fit the allocated space. You run text of a chapter from the starting page, usually not beginning at the top, to the last one that should be fill with at least 1/3 of text.

End of chapters' page? The rule is to have at least 1/3 of the top of the page with text or more, or try to fit the few remaining lines, if they are less, in the previous pages. And have the chapter's opening pages on a right page.

 

If you're talking about the special 1000+ pages book, the end of chapter text frames were aligned to the top. I'm not sure why this book was made this way, but since the client asked a really low price to remake this book, I suppose it was made like this in the beginning for not spending too many time on it. For now, the project is on stand by, I didn't get the text to play around.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Wosven said:

End of chapters' page? The rule is to have at least 1/3 of the top of the page with text or more, or try to fit the few remaining lines, if they are less, in the previous pages. And have the chapter's opening pages on a right page.

I have lots of novels, both paperback & hardcover, that have no more that 1/5 or 1/4 of the last page of a chapter filled with text. This includes books from major US publishers. I also have lots that do not start chapters on the right page, or even consistently on either the left or right page.

One example is the popular novels of John Sandford published by Putnam & Sons, but there are dozens of others. Whatever rules there might once have been, at least in the US they have long since been abandoned.

[Old Bruce]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

Whatever rules there might once have been, at least in the US they have long since been abandoned.

The rules are "use as little ink and paper as possible" in all publishing houses.

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

The rules are "use as little ink and paper as possible" in all publishing houses.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "as possible," but I have lots of hardcover novels that use more than the minimum possible amount of paper needed to display the book's content. Sometimes a blank page will be added so that the division between a chapter or part is more evident. There are often several blank pages added at the end, I assume to make the binding easier to do.

Paragraphs are usually single spaced but sometimes blank lines or lines with decorations are inserted to signify a change of location, the passage of time, that what follows is from the perspective of a different character, or some other literary device. Sometimes a block of text is inset from the margins as well as separated by blank lines from the text that comes before & after it, for example for the text of a letter or other document some character is reading in the narrative.

So as rules go, this seems to be a pretty loosely applied one.

[Old Bruce]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

So as rules go, this seems to be a pretty loosely applied one.

I mean that Publishers don't want to spend more money on Ink and Paper than they have to. Obviously they also take into consideration the fact that an ugly looking tiny font with no real space between lines will sell fewer copies than a well designed book which costs them more to print due to the number of pages increasing.

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

There are often several blank pages added at the end, I assume to make the binding easier to do.

Assume correctly, not just easier but possible with some jobs.

[Wosven]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

I have lots of novels, both paperback & hardcover, that have no more that 1/5 or 1/4 of the last page of a chapter filled with text. This includes books from major US publishers. I also have lots that do not start chapters on the right page, or even consistently on either the left or right page.

Our majors or older publisher try to keep those rules, and it's always a pleasure to look at those books. Some smaller editors do nice jobs too with their books. The lower they get, the lower their results.

It's sometime a pain to read a magazine or a book when you want to take a pen and write down corrections you want to give te one who did the layout… or because the paper quality and printing is low.

It usually depend of the budget of the client too. We can have time to do a nice job, or we can print PDF made by clients, and those are worst. Last time I did this with PDF for English, Spanich and French versions of the same text, I should admit the quality of the text formatting was in this order. There's nearly no education about formatting text in France, when we can have really good texts. It's a shame that teachers don't know better but spelling and grammar. It should be like for food: presentation is important too.

 

[Wosven]

28 minutes ago, R C-R said:

There are often several blank pages added at the end,

It's because books are made of booklets (the number of page you get folding a piece of paper), and those booklets can be of 8, 12, 24, 32.. or even 48 pages. On larger books, you keep the white pages at the end if the number of pages printed isn't a mutliple of the booklet ones.

Sometime, you'll have to fit the text in a specific number of pages (the maker—fabricant—will have agreed with a printer a cost for the book depending of the paper, the way the cover is made, colour or black, etc.). With luck you'll have extra pages and can do a nice work, or you'll have to do your best to fit the text in… with smaller margins, smaller text, etc.