Word spacing: no longer mouse click, only typing in the number?

[Amy Choue]

(I am on Windows). The last time I used Publisher was before the latest update. I remember using word spacing menu under "Justification" of the Paragraph panel by clicking on arrow (it must have been arrow, I guess) beside dialogue box. This worked really well for dealing with orphans and widows. It was almost fun to manipulate paragraphs with this. 

Has it been changed? I opened Publisher today, and I cannot do as I did the last time. There are dialogue boxes for word spacing under Justification, but clicking does not work. And I put in number by typing, and this does not seem to work either. 

How do we adjust word spacing with the latest Publisher? 

[Amy Choue]

I just realized that word spacing the way I did before was also very useful in moving the footnotes around. Publisher seems to prefer not to split footnotes and tend to send footnotes of some length to a new page. So, there was often a blank space left, like the one below. I could compress paragraphs with word spacing and resolve this issue as well. 

Please let me know what I can do to adjust word spacing! I'm having these problems and do not know what I can do. 

 

[MikeTO]

Hi Amy, nothing has changed with word spacing. But you can't enter any value you want - desired (middle) must be <= maximum (right), so if maximum is 100 as shown in your screenshot you cannot increase desired.

The default values for word spacing are 80, 100, and 133. You can enter values from 0 to 250 but minimum must be <= desired and desired must be <= maximum. If you click the arrow to the right of each text field a slider will appear to change the number.

Edited December 8, 2023 by MikeTO
Added screenshot

[Amy Choue]

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Hi Amy, nothing has changed with word spacing. But you can't enter any value you want - desired (middle) must be <= maximum (right), so if maximum is 100 as shown in your screenshot you cannot increase desired.

 

Many thanks for the comment. It was a great relief to hear that nothing has changed. But it seems so different from how I did this before. With a paragraph like the one below, I could compress the paragraph so that it becomes a line (or two lines even) shorter. If it seemed the compression was too severe, then I could undo that by increasing the word spacing by clicking. 

Now word spacing can be changed by using the slider, but there cannot be significant increase or decrease. Is this true? If this is true, then the issues from orphans and widows, and the blank spaces due to footnote placing, will be much harder to resolve. Or is this not the case? How can we reduce the blank space that footnotes create? 

 

 

 

[MikeTO]

I don't know what to tell you, nothing has changed with regard to word or character spacing. It might just be that some of your current document's words can't be hyphenated - for example, Girondists won't hyphenate.

If you're using footnotes you can experience big gaps at the bottom of a column if there isn't space for the entire footnote below the footnote marker as shown in the screenshot below. In this example there are no flow options set for the body text or footnote text. To fix this, I could enable "split notes" and the note will be split across the columns. No amount of tweaking of word and character spacing for both paragraphs will fix this, it can't be solved without using split notes.

To use the full range of word and character spacing set minimum to 0 and maximum to 250. Then you can set desired to whatever you want. I don't recommend this but you can do it.

[Amy Choue]

This is odd. In my Publisher, I always enable "split notes," which works fine when the notes are quite long, but doesn't work when the notes are somewhat long (between 4-7 lines long). I could fix this by narrowing the word spacing of the paragraphs that precede the paragraph with the note. I quite enjoyed doing this. This wasn't covered in any tutorial I studied; I came upon it by chance and thought "aha, this is the way orphans and widows and gaps from footnotes are dealt with!" 

Maybe, I wonder, if it's possible to somehow uninstall updates, the problem will not be a problem. 

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Amy Choue said:

With a paragraph like the one below, I could compress the paragraph so that it becomes a line (or two lines even) shorter.

Are you sure that you achieved 1-2 fewer lines just by reducing word spacing? To me it appears quite unlikely if you see what happens with 0%. (in APub V1)

[MikeTO]

48 minutes ago, Amy Choue said:

This is odd. In my Publisher, I always enable "split notes," which works fine when the notes are quite long, but doesn't work when the notes are somewhat long (between 4-7 lines long). I could fix this by narrowing the word spacing of the paragraphs that precede the paragraph with the note. I quite enjoyed doing this. This wasn't covered in any tutorial I studied; I came upon it by chance and thought "aha, this is the way orphans and widows and gaps from footnotes are dealt with!" 

Maybe, I wonder, if it's possible to somehow uninstall updates, the problem will not be a problem. 

It's possible to reinstall an older version from Serif's site but you won't be able to open documents you saved from 2.3 in that version. And there really is no difference in spacing - if there were, everybody would be screaming because documents saved from 2.2 would be spaced differently when opened in 2.3.

Perhaps you're also thinking of tracking and not just word spacing - designers often tweak tracking just a tiny bit to avoid widows and orphans.

Here are two articles on manually fixing widows and orphans in other apps but of course you'd have to "translate" the features to the equivalents in Affinity.

https://creativepro.com/how-solve-typographic-widows-and-orphans/

https://creativepro.com/the-digital-dish-kill-the-widows-and-orphans/

[Oufti]

22 minutes ago, Amy Choue said:

This wasn't covered in any tutorial I studied; I came upon it by chance and thought "aha, this is the way orphans and widows and gaps from footnotes are dealt with!" 

Amid different things, it can be done this way, as long as it is not too noticeable.  (And if so, I also doubt it will be sufficient to gain a line (except for a last short one).

In my humble view, I tconsider in general that the Minimum word spacing should never be inferior to the width of the letter i, Normal word spacing somewhere round the width of a dot, and Maximum possibly even like an n but should never be greater than the space between the x-height and the baseline of the line above.

The percent values to achieve that can vary following the font chosen. 

[Amy Choue]

8 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Are you sure that you achieved 1-2 fewer lines just by reducing word spacing?

Yes, I am absolutely sure of this. I remember enjoying this greatly, so much so that I did it with manuscripts that need not be formatted. It was a great pleasure to see page numbers changing, after paragraph shortening, and becoming fewer in the end. 

Oh, I now remember, I even have PDFs, one with no or little word spacing, and another with much tweaking with word spacing. I'll have to look over them and try think this through.