How to make justified body text (like in newspapers) look nice …?

[pummelfee]

When i compare my daily work in AP with InDesign now i must regret, that (at least i have the feeling) that justified body text looked better, somehow... Not only that the hyphenation is more often false then in the old days, but the whole look of a large justified text in 3 or 4 colums (on a A4 page) is often not much satisfying. So i spend much more time in manual adjustments, like setting one text-line a percent up or down and so on, stepping lines back and forth and do new manual hyphenations to make the whole page look good. Work steps, that i did not remember in that quantity. 

BUT please don’t get me wrong! I do not just complain about AP2 here, i think i actually complain more in my overall skills to handle the almost infinite settings that can be done. 

Anyone, a tipp for me where i can find good tutorials or maybe threads here (i did not found anything) about justified body text and typography of newspaper style body text in general? I am not searching for tutorials how to make crazy and stylish magazine headlines and  fx and other eye candy. Just the „down to earth“ body text that was much easier in the Quark and InDesign days for me.

[Bobaffinity]

You can set your margins and then start experimenting with both word spacing and letter spacing. I usually set type (both word and letter spacing) somewhat tighter than the type designer does. 

James Felici has an outstanding book on typesetting (The Complete Manual of Typography) that will really help give you much more control over the appearance of your type. And it will make your type read much better. You might also look on the internet for any magazine articles that Felici or other qualified typesetters have written.

Hope this helps.

 

 

 

[thomaso]

12 hours ago, pummelfee said:

... InDesign now i must regret, that (at least i have the feeling) that justified body text looked better, somehow.

This may be caused by the fact that ID has an extra / alternative option to choose for justified text, which is missing in Affinity. As mentioned by @Bobaffinity, word and character spacing is the available solution in Affinity. It's placed in the Paragraph Panel > Justification.

It's default values are the same as in ID. Its reaction & effect depends a lot on the specific text, font, size and column width, so there is no recipe for a "better" or "best" adjustment if the default doesn't ideally work.

It is useful to experiment with various settings, without modifying all of the available properties but start with e.g. the 2 minimum values only or the 3 character spacings only to experience how they influence the text at all. If you modify too many values (you have 6 in this panel + 2 in the Character Panel) it can be quite hard or even impossible to achieve a satisfying result, especially if the character values in the two panels get set in a conflicting way.

Here's an article about this subject:
https://creativepro.com/the-complete-guide-to-word-spacing/

Another option is the Paragraph Panel > Hyphenation settings which can get influenced in Affinity by 8 parameters.

For both, spacings + hypenation, a manual setting in single lines should not be necessary, and it is useful to avoid them simply to avoid confusion by the effects of the various settings across an entire document. For paragraph justification options it is not necessary to select single lines in a paragraph because paragraph settings affect the entire paragraph anyway. I would try first to fix it with the paragraph justification options (word + character) and avoid the Character Panel. Though, again depending on the specific situation, e.g. if very few lines in a paragraph feel wrong, it also can be sufficient to use the Character panel only – while your initial topic seems to indicate you have more than just a few lines to fix.

Depending on the language the dictionary in Affinity may be faulty, as reported in the forum e.g. for German a few times. You will notice them by just a wrong rather than a missing hyphenation. These of course require manual correction. Then the soft- or the non-breaking hyphens maybe more useful than manual 'hacking' because they auto-flow with the text accordingly if a line break changes somewhere else.

[David Gamble]

These are the values I use when justifying galleys/columns of text in the magazines I design:

85, 95, 105

-3, -1, 2

As also stated by others, hyphenation is essential.

[henryanthony]

@pummelfee I hope you find this useful or at least interesting. Over the years, I learned a lot about the effective use of type from this publication.

"U&lc (Upper and Lower Case), was a typographic magazine from the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) dedicated to showcasing their typefaces. The publication featured often experimental typographic compositions juxtaposed with illustrations, cartoons, and imagery. It was originally edited and designed by Herb Lubalin. Over 120 issues were published between 1970 and 1999." 

I used to subscribe to this but just tossed them away. I wish I had saved them.

PDF versions in different resolutions can be downloaded from the fonts.com blog: http://blog.fonts.com/category/ulc/

[pummelfee]

So many helpful answers! Thank you so much! As i mentioned, i think its more my lack of skills that i do not have with affinity yet, but affinity itself. 

However, one thing that is new in V2 and that i can’t solve is:

In justified Text, Publisher makes wrong line breaks with qotations: Example:

„Aashjs shs jdhdjkshd. Adjhahj
aj sdjasl askdja alsk daasj aklk.
"

The dot at the end of the sentence and the last quotation mark [.“] should not be devided (regardless what software it is and how stupid i am ;-).