Alternative for 'balance ragged lines'?

[Skizzievogel]

Does anyone have a good alternative for Indesigns 'balance ragged lines'? So far I've managed with manually balancing lines. But now I'm working on a book so that's not an option. I was hoping (praying) similar functionality would have been added by now but alas. (or did I miss something?) I don't want to go back to indesign 😢😭😟

[MikeTO]

There is no equivalent function in Publisher.

Assuming your text is hyphenated, I recommend:

• Review your hyphenation settings. I provide some recommendations in my Publisher manual (download the free PDF from the link in my signature). The settings I use in my Publisher manual are (from top to bottom of the panel) 0, 5, 3, 3, 2, 2p4.8, 0, 3p7.2, 3p7.2
• If you are composing English text but not for the UK, change the hyphenation language for all of your text to English (United Kingdom), preferably by editing the paragraph styles. It may not be optimized for your version of English but it will usually give you better hyphenation because the Hunspell US hyphenation dictionary used by Affinity and many other applications is so poor. These are the only two freely-available Hunspell hyphenation dictionaries for English.

Good luck

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Skizzievogel]

11 hours ago, lacerto said:

Therefore, when automatic balancing of ragged lines (and paragraph composing) is not available, manual balancing (and hyphenation, if enabled) is typically needed.

Yes, I know, and this is exactly what I would like to avoid. I remember the not so good old days with documents which were filled with manual exceptions. And the hell of having to remove/ revisit these exceptions every time the client decides to change a piece of text (and missing a couple, wreaking havoc). Because telling them 'I'll balance all text once you are done' usually does not fly.

 

On 9/17/2024 at 5:04 PM, MikeTO said:

Review your hyphenation settings

Thank you, I have and it does help a bit but paragraph composing is way, way better. By chance I'm working on English text this time (when I do I use the British dictionary) but usually it's Dutch, and let me tell you, that dictionary is really bad .  I was hoping for a plugin. I cannot be the only one despairing?

Question: where would one buy decent hyphenation dictionaries? In hindsight it is strange I did not think of this sooner.

Edited September 19, 2024 by Skizzievogel
Additional question

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Skizzievogel said:

Question: where would one buy decent hyphenation dictionaries? In hindsight it is strange I did not think of this sooner.

You can't buy them. The English Hunspell dictionaries were provided freely by dictionary owners at the dawn of the computer age they and they are understandably reluctant to do that again because it destroyed their business. Microsoft licensed better dictionaries for MS Office but Hunspell is a free system.

Maybe the next CEO of a company like Apple will be a spelling and hyphenation nerd and direct their team to fix it once and for all.

[Skizzievogel]

Thank you for enlightening me. So all companies doing anything with text have to draw up their own dictionaries??? There is no exchange or general licensing scheme whatsoever? *mind blown* Now I'm wondering if anyone ever tried extracting dictionary files from MS Office or similar. But that's another story.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Skizzievogel said:

Thank you for enlightening me. So all companies doing anything with text have to draw up their own dictionaries??? There is no exchange or general licensing scheme whatsoever? *mind blown*

Apple integrates Hunspell spelling and hyphenation checking into its operating systems so apps that run only on these platforms don't need their own dictionaries.

Microsoft has always had its own high-quality dictionaries for MS Office and integrated the spelling dictionaries into Windows 8 and above so apps that run only on Windows also don't need their own dictionaries. I believe Android uses Hunspell, too, but I haven't looked into it.

Cross-platform apps that require hyphenation can't use Windows spell checking because it doesn't offer hyphenation. But even if it did, the hyphenation break points would change when you shared documents between Mac and Windows and your text would reflow. Most cross-platform apps like Affinity use Hunspell on both platforms.

Adobe bundles Hunspell with its apps on Mac and Windows but augments it with its own proprietary dictionaries.

Edited September 19, 2024 by MikeTO
corrected

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

can't use Windows spell checking because it doesn't offer hyphenation.

I wasn't aware that Windows offers spell-checking at all, Mike. So thanks for mentioning it. But having done some research, I see that while Windows Settings does have some Spelling-related settings, they don't seem to have any effect on my system, which may explain why I never realized it offered them.

Edit: Well, I just found one setting that seems to have an effect, the one to suggest words while typing. That one shows suggestions as I type in Firefox (e.g., when posting here) and it is very annoying in my opinion. So I turned that one back off. Auto-correct does not seem to work, though.

Edited September 19, 2024 by walt.farrell
Discovered something new

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

I wasn't aware that Windows offers spell-checking at all, Mike. So thanks for mentioning it. But having done some research, I see that while Windows Settings does have some Spelling-related settings, they don't seem to have any effect on my system, which may explain why I never realized it offered them.

Edit: Well, I just found one setting that seems to have an effect, the one to suggest words while typing. That one shows suggestions as I type in Firefox (e.g., when posting here) and it is very annoying in my opinion. So I turned that one back off. Auto-correct does not seem to work, though.

TBH I didn't know about it until today either. It doesn't do hyphenation so it's no help to apps like Affinity. Existing apps would already have had a working solution so would be slow to change. Edge only started using it in 2020, having previously used Hunspell which is used by Chromium.

[Oufti]

On 9/19/2024 at 2:03 AM, lacerto said:

[…] the prerequisite for this functionality [balance ragged lines] is existence of paragraph composer, a feature that calculates wrapping of words paragraph-wise, not just line-wise. […]. This is as far as I know a unique feature of InDesign

To be complete, such a paragraph composer existed in HZ, a program from the foundry URW that has been a basis for InDesign. 

Details here:
http://www.typografi.org/justering/gut_hz/gutenberg_hz_english.html  

The same algorithm is also used in (La)TeX. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program