Can I adjust word spacing line by line?

[Tim Be]

In Publisher, to adjust tracking for just one line (or any unit shorter than the whole paragraph) I just highlight the desired words and adjust the tracking. But when I do the same for word spacing it adjusts the whole paragraph. Is there some other method to do this or did I find a bug in the program? Thanks.

[thomaso]

It works to me in V1 with the tracking option in the Character panel. – Can you upload a screenshot demonstrating your issue?

[Oufti]

Since tracking is a character attribute, you can indeed apply it to any part of text. But word spacing is a paragraph attribute (it is controlled by the Paragraph panel), thus it is always applied to whole paragraphs. 

If you need to modify the word spacing only for some spaces, as a dirty mean of doing you could multi-select (on Mac, with the cmd-key, probably ctrl-key on PC) the spaces of a line and modify their body size — provided you have a fixed interline spacing…

 

 

[Tim Be]

Thanks. I guess I should have known that because it was under the paragraph heading it would apply to the whole paragraph. And thanks to both of you for suggesting the space-by-space workarounds.

I don't know if Affinity employees read this forum, but having word spacing apply only to whole paragraphs is a really dumb thing to do. It would be great if this mistake can be fixed in a future update because the workarounds take a lot of time.

Edited October 5, 2023 by Tim Be
Added info about wasted time.

[thomaso]

14 minutes ago, Oufti said:

Since tracking is a character attribute, you can indeed apply it to any part of text. But word spacing is a paragraph attribute (it is controlled by the Paragraph panel)

Can you explain what you mean? In APub V1 I have several options for spacing: in the Character panel A.) as "Tracking" for selected text, B.) as "Kerning" for a certain position of the text cursor. And C.) in the Paragraph panel -> "Justification" for paragraphs as letter or as word spacing.

[Tim Be]

3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Can you explain what you mean? In APub V1 I have several options for spacing: in the Character panel A.) as "Tracking" for selected text, B.) as "Kerning" for a certain position of the text cursor. And C.) in the Paragraph panel -> "Justification" for paragraphs as letter or as word spacing.

Highlighting some text and changing the word spacing with a single action would be far faster than having to highlight individual spaces.

[thomaso]

3 minutes ago, Tim Be said:

Highlighting some text and changing the word spacing with a single action would be far faster than having to highlight individual spaces.

Ah, I was confused by your initial post, mentioning "I just highlight the desired words and adjust the tracking". Then doing "the same for word spacing" would mean to highlight word spacings first, right?

Now it seems you are missing a character attribute which would affect letters vs. spaces independently? (currently if you highlight a line of several words both the letters and their word spaces get the tracking assigned).

As a workaround you could try if it works in V2 to save a paragraph style which then gets applied as character style. – In V1 it appears not to work: although the font colour gets assigned to a selected line within a paragraph, its increased word spacing is ignored then. Well, it could be on purpose / by design that this option assigns the character attributes of a paragraph style only, maintaining all paragraph attributes of the 'parent' paragraph style.

[Oufti]

12 hours ago, thomaso said:

As a workaround you could try if it works in V2 to save a paragraph style which then gets applied as character style. – In V1 it appears not to work: although the font colour gets assigned to a selected line within a paragraph, its increased word spacing is ignored then.

No, it doesn't. I had the same idea and tested this without success in v2 before posting above. 

It seems logical that all attributes that can be defined in the Paragraph section of the Edit style window apply only to whole paragraphs, while those defined in Character or Typography section can be applied at a character level. 

This is the same for the Letter spacing defined in the Paragraph panel > Justification,  or e.g. for the Line spacing… 

[Oufti]

14 hours ago, Tim Be said:

[…] having word spacing apply only to whole paragraphs is a really dumb thing to do.

Should you have the possibility to space word separately for a line within a paragraph, then I don't see how it could be dealt with by the software if you change column width or modify the text? It is perhaps better to adjust the minimal or maximal values to achieve your goal… 

If you want to have full manual control — I agree that for fine typography it is sometimes necessary —, you can split any paragraph in lines and justify each of them as precisely you want. But that's definitely something I would avoid in common work… 

[phps]

I have a case where paragraph-independent control of word spacing is necessary: a dialogue with the speakers’ names and titles (e.g. Mr. Smith, Professor Jones) in small caps. I want the overall text justified, but the speakers’ names and titles to always be spaced the same, because they line up at the left edge and look bad if they are spaced differently on different lines.

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, phps said:

I have a case where paragraph-independent control of word spacing is necessary: a dialogue with the speakers’ names and titles (e.g. Mr. Smith, Professor Jones) in small caps. I want the overall text justified, but the speakers’ names and titles to always be spaced the same, because they line up at the left edge and look bad if they are spaced differently on different lines.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @phps.

From your description, I’m not sure you actually need independent control of word spacing. It sounds as though you just need a hanging indent to allow for the fact that ‘Mr. Smith’ takes up much less horizontal space than ‘Professor Jones’. (I would question the decision to abbreviate ‘Mister’ without also abbreviating ‘Professor’ in the present example, but I understand that we’re just discussing general principles here.)

[phps]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @phps.

From your description, I’m not sure you actually need independent control of word spacing. It sounds as though you just need a hanging indent to allow for the fact that ‘Mr. Smith’ takes up much less horizontal space than ‘Professor Jones’. (I would question the decision to abbreviate ‘Mister’ without also abbreviating ‘Professor’ in the present example, but I understand that we’re just discussing general principles here.)

Thanks! I don't want different names/titles to line up with each other, but with other instances of the same name -- if Mr/Mister Smith and Prof/Professor Jones are having a long dialogue, it looks bad if different instances of "Mister Smith" are of different lengths. It seems to me that Publisher allows me to keep the tracking constant, using a Character Style, but not the spacing in between name and title, because that's a Paragraph Style feature.

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, phps said:

Thanks! I don't want different names/titles to line up with each other, but with other instances of the same name -- if Mr/Mister Smith and Prof/Professor Jones are having a long dialogue, it looks bad if different instances of "Mister Smith" are of different lengths. It seems to me that Publisher allows me to keep the tracking constant, using a Character Style, but not the spacing in between name and title, because that's a Paragraph Style feature.

Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if all you need in this particular case is a non-breaking space between the honorific and the surname.

[MikeTO]

13 minutes ago, phps said:

I have a case where paragraph-independent control of word spacing is necessary: a dialogue with the speakers’ names and titles (e.g. Mr. Smith, Professor Jones) in small caps. I want the overall text justified, but the speakers’ names and titles to always be spaced the same, because they line up at the left edge and look bad if they are spaced differently on different lines.

You can't adjust word and letter spacing at the character level - those are paragraph attributes. So if you're using justification and finding that the names aren't aligning as shown in the left screenshot it might seem that you can't do it.

But there's a trick you can use. Replace the space after "Professor Jones:" with a tab and a thin space and set the default tab spacing to very narrow (e.g., 1mm, 0p1, etc.) See the right screenshot below.

The tab will solve the alignment issue but it might be too narrow depending on the names. But the extra space (a thin space, a third space, whatever looks good for your text) will solve that.

I gave it a try and it worked pretty well.

 

[phps]

43 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if all you need in this particular case is a non-breaking space between the honorific and the surname.

Thanks for the suggestion. That would be simple and great, but it doesn’t seem to work.

[phps]

41 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

You can't adjust word and letter spacing at the character level - those are paragraph attributes. So if you're using justification and finding that the names aren't aligning as shown in the left screenshot it might seem that you can't do it.

But there's a trick you can use. Replace the space after "Professor Jones:" with a tab and a thin space and set the default tab spacing to very narrow (e.g., 1mm, 0p1, etc.) See the right screenshot below.

The tab will solve the alignment issue but it might be too narrow depending on the names. But the extra space (a thin space, a third space, whatever looks good for your text) will solve that.

I gave it a try and it worked pretty well.

 

Thanks very much! Tried it and it seems to be an effective workaround. I’d still like to be able to control the spacing with just a style, (or a not-susceptible-to-justification space character)!

[Oufti]

8 hours ago, Alfred said:

I wonder if all you need in this particular case is a non-breaking space between the honorific and the surname.

7 hours ago, phps said:

(or a not-susceptible-to-justification space character)

The idea was good but just not with a non breaking space, since these vary in width as a normal space.

If instead you use between honorific title and name any fixed width spaces (em-space, en-space or fractional spaces), it will always remain spaced the same — whatever the justification does with the rest of the text.
[Usually, 1/3 or 1/4 of an em-space should be close to normal unjustified spaces.] 

You can choose between these various spaces via the menu Text > Insert > Spaces and tabulations.

 

[Alfred]

11 hours ago, Oufti said:

The idea was good but just not with a non breaking space, since these vary in width as a normal space.

I should have thought of that. Duh!

[thomaso]

11 hours ago, Oufti said:

just not with a non breaking space, since these vary in width as a normal space.

Whereas the Narrow Non-Breaking Space works. Also Punctuation Space and Figure Space are not affected by additional word spacing … but accordingly, and unlike 'Normal' Space, may cause increased character spacing instead in "all justified" paragraphs.

[phps]

Now that I’m using a fixed-width space, I can see that the Character Style is also not able to keep tracking constant for the honorific/name phrases, even if I choose “apply Paragraph Style and preserve Character formatting”. Is there any way to override Paragraph justification settings for tracking in a particular phrase, besides the Tab method suggested above?

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, phps said:

I can see that the Character Style is also not able to keep tracking constant for the honorific/name phrases, even if I choose “apply Paragraph Style and preserve Character formatting”.

As mentioned already a.) the word/character spacing (-> "Justification") is a paragraph attribute and b.) even if a paragraph style gets applied to characters only (as character style) it will assign only the character attributes but maintain the paragraph's word spacing. Thus it would require a tab if you want to combine/mix left aligned and justified text.

Or you use a separate paragraph style for the names, without any special space or tab. Below for instance with leading 0 + baseline shift (for the names) + first line indents (for the story text). Well, it is rather fun than practical ;•)