Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted

I'm laying out a long book. My prior workflow was in Word. Since Word's widow and orphan control often results in an unequal number of lines on a page (making spreads ugly), my workflow was to turn off W+O control, hyphenate, and then manually fix each W and O by adjusting character spacing, etc. This often requires rewriting if the text is a lot of dialogue in short chapters. It is a cumbersome process that can take days.

I had assumed that programs like Indesign and AP would do this "automatically." By that I mean you would set criteria for widows, orphans, keep lines together, hyphenation, etc and then the program would make whatever adjustments were needed in character spacing needed so the book would end up with the same number of lines on each page, even if it had to add or subtract pages in the overall book.

I find it hard to believe that the big publishing houses do all this manually. Do they have some special software? Or if not, is there some way to do this in AP? I've tried all kinds of combinations of settings. I am relatively new to AP and have seen some posts the suggest that the baseline grid might help, but I couldn't figure out how it might.

Am I asking for something that is just beyond the capabilities of (any) software?

Though I appreciate Publisher, if I can't do the above, it really doesn't provide much improvement over just laying out the book in Word, especially since a long book slows Publisher to a 15 second between actions crawl.

 

 

 

 

Posted

Thanks for your insights. Actually, I could live with the example you posted, even though I suspect it might make you or others with a keen eye cringe. I'm even okay with the runt (or widow or orphan, depending on which definition people are choosing to use) on the last line if it isn't really short. I'd be happy if I could just avoid a very short line ending on the top of either page (like the 'and be content' in your example).

Typos are a separate peeve. I can even imagine a few of them (especially ending quotes) making it through the proofing, but after the book has had 12 printings, certainly readers have pointed them out!

I may just stick with Word for book layout, unless someone tells me I'm being stupid.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.