Strange Spacing Appears When I Paste in Text from Word

[NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery]

I've not been able to figure out a weird spacing issue that appears when I post text into Affinity Publisher's text frames. Fiddling with alignment or justification doesn't resolve it. These gaps just appear when I put stuff from Word into the software.

Below is a screencap where I've highlighted most of the gaps. I suspect the solution is simple but can't figure it. Does anybody know what this is and how to fix it?

 

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery

I would expect spaces like that with the Justify Paragraph settings where the software makes the spaces bigger because it can only fit so many words onto a line.

One quick way to lessen the effect would be to switch Auto-Hyphenation on.

[NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery]

Ah, my magazine layout guy did already turn that on, and it absolutely helped a lot. There are still some big spaces hanging out, though. He does think you're correct about the cause—justification of text, strange number of words to fit on the line. He's just not sure what can be done about it. 

In other words, it’s not a bug or technical problem, but perhaps a naturally occurring layout issue?

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

He's just not sure what can be done about it. 

In other words, it’s not a bug or technical problem, but perhaps a naturally occurring layout issue?

Can we see what it looks like with auto-hyphenation enabled?

And yes, it might just be the way things will be with that column width and text size. Note that Publisher's justification is line-by-line, not for an entire paragraph as other applications may implement. For "what to do", changing the column width, revising the text, or adding some manual hyphenation might help. You can also try adjusting the word-spacing or letter-spacing options under Justification in the Paragraph panel, or the tracking options for the text in Positioning and Transform in the Character panel.

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

In other words, it’s not a bug or technical problem, but perhaps a naturally occurring layout issue?

Asked and answered. Yes it is natural.

[NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery]

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Edited September 16, 2022 by NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery
Want to delete but cant'?

[NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Can we see what it looks like with auto-hyphenation enabled?

And yes, it might just be the way things will be with that column width and text size. Note that Publisher's justification is line-by-line, not for an entire paragraph as other applications may implement. For "what to do", changing the column width, revising the text, or adding some manual hyphenation might help. You can also try adjusting the word-spacing or letter-spacing options under Justification in the Paragraph panel, or the tracking options for the text in Positioning and Transform in the Character panel.

Ah, thank you Walt! You've given him some new options he'll explore. In the meanwhile, I gather what you see in the screenshot I've shared is indeed what it looks like with auto-hyphenation.

Our guiding light for this is the Summer 1968 issue of Horizon magazine, which uses three narrow columns too, and they don't have the issue...but something tells me they weren't using Affinity Publisher!

[walt.farrell]

40 minutes ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

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You can't delete, but you can probably click on the "..." icon at the top of the post and choose Hide from the options.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

In the meanwhile, I gather what you see in the screenshot I've shared is indeed what it looks like with auto-hyphenation.

If it were enabled I would have expected the word "passion" at the beginning of the second line to appear hyphenated at the end of the first line, "pas-", with the "sion" on the second line.

So I suspect some setting is not correct. 

Can you share part of the document with us, so we can examine it in detail?

[NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery]

10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If it were enabled I would have expected the word "passion" at the beginning of the second line to appear hyphenated at the end of the first line, "pas-", with the "sion" on the second line.

So I suspect some setting is not correct. 

Can you share part of the document with us, so we can examine it in detail?

Sure! My editor has since tried some of what's been suggested and vastly improved it.


But it's still kinda there...

[GarryP]

16 hours ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

But it's still kinda there...

I’ve attached an example showing the same text formatted in four different ways, from left to right:
1. Simple Left Align;
2. Simple Left Justification;
3. Left Justification and Auto-hyphenation;
4. As 3 but with Optical Alignment from the font and some basic manual work done with Tracking.

Version 4 isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination but hopefully it shows the difference between just letting the software do its thing and giving it a manual ‘nudge’ here and there.

As with most things, the more work you put into it the better it can be.

Note: ‘Proper’ digital typesetting is something that will probably take more than one large book to explain properly.

[iconoclast]

To compensate the spacing, I would first select the whole text and then adjust a global Tracking, that almost fits good (Studio Panel "Positioning and Transform"). Then I would do individual Tracking line by line. But take care that the single characters don't overlap or are aparted too much. Also take care that the Trackings aren't too different, especially consecutive lines. In combination with a good Hyphenation Setting, this should work.

[Palatino]

18 hours ago, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

Sure! My editor has since tried some of what's been suggested and vastly improved it.

The letter spacing is very large, which also increases the word spacing - and at some point the word spacing is just too large.

[R C-R]

On 9/16/2022 at 9:21 AM, NewEdgeSwordAndSorcery said:

I suspect the solution is simple but can't figure it.

The bottom line is that if you insist on justifying the text, there is no simple "one size fits all" solution. You can revise the text, adjust tracking, or whatever, but there is no automatic way to always make word spacing uniform in justified text. See for example https://practicaltypography.com/justified-text.html for more about this.

[Old Bruce]

18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

but there is no automatic way to always make word spacing uniform in justified text.

Even Monospaced fonts will have problems unless the width of the text frame is (somehow) an integer multiple of the glyphs' width and we manually hyphenate words disregarding all rules for hyphenating. Even then I bet I could come up with examples of text that would not work. But I am not going to.

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Even Monospaced fonts will have problems unless the width of the text frame is (somehow) an integer multiple of the glyphs' width and we manually hyphenate words disregarding all rules for hyphenating.

Yes, & by disregarding hyphenation rules you you could end up with something horrible looking & very hard to read!