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Balance Ragged Lines


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I would also like to suggest the "Balance ragged lines" feature. This is something I use in almost every publication I produce.

For those who do not know what I am talking about, this is a feature from InDesign. Imagine a center-aligned heading that is just a bit too long to fit on a single line. Normally, this would mean only the last word or so would get bumped to the next line. Such as this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy
dog

Balance ragged lines would instead display the following, without any need for forcing a line break:

The quick brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog

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  • 3 weeks later...

+1 very useful

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This would be stupendous, BUT I’d like to be able to override it on a per-line basis, and insert hyphenation manually in an otherwise non-hyphenated paragraph. But, a great feature suggestion.

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  • 4 weeks later...

My experience with this feature is mixed at best, I finally just shut it off.

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  • 1 year later...
On 9/1/2018 at 1:28 AM, garrettm30 said:

Balance ragged lines would instead display the following, without any need for forcing a line break:

The quick brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog

Unfortunately it is much better to do this manually. I would prefer the one above be:

The quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy dog

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On 3/29/2020 at 7:51 AM, Fixx said:

it is much better to do this manually

The irony is, because this just forum layout, the example I gave was in fact done manually, and I broke it where I preferred the break (I prefer the longer line on top). As you noted, you "prefer" it another way, and of course there is room for different preferences. However, in view of the fact that preferences on where to divide the line manually do vary, I respectfully disagree with your statement that doing it manually is "much better."

But whether longer line on top or not (or perhaps rather division by semantics or not), I prefer even more the savings of time. I recently had a project involving many hundreds of pages of poetic line where each line of verse was a hanging indent. Many of the lines extended beyond a single line by only a word or two, meaning the overflow line was short, and the overall look of the page struck me as hectic, as though the columns of text looked like a comb. I started out by spending several hours manually breaking the lines, but I wasn't even 10% complete and I was running out of time on my schedule. I tried the automatic balance ragged lines in InDesign, and I liked the overall balance of the page better. In fact, I went back and undid most of my manual work and opted instead for the automatic for a clean, consistent appearance.

Also another reason: as a general principle, I avoid as much as possible achieving format by inserting elements into the text.

It is clear that not everyone has the same use to this feature, but it does have its use.

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There are times when I very much prefer to use "balance ragged lines" for the same reasons stated by @garrettm30. If nothing else, it provides a good starting point. Other times, this provides an undesirable effect … but is, after all, why we still have human typesetters, right ;-) . "Balance ragged lines" is a tool, like any other in our toolbox, and it's nice to have it available.

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  • 7 months later...
On 3/29/2020 at 8:51 AM, Fixx said:

Unfortunately it is much better to do this manually. I would prefer the one above be:

The quick brown fox
jumped over the lazy dog

Maybe there need to be "balance ascending" and "balance descending" modes to prefer one order over the other?

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I stumbled across an interesting observation recently in this regard that leads me to believe that a multiline composer works together with and is possibly even necessary for the ragged balance lines concept to work. Consider the example in this screenshot from Indesign:

1778276567_ScreenShot2020-11-16at9_13_34AM.thumb.png.c3df4781311093ce5805af2dc3768cca.png

Here you see two text boxes that are identical in every respect (that is, I duplicated them) with the sole exception that the box on the right has balance ragged lines activated. Compare the first line of the paragraph in both versions: in order to achieve the more balanced look in the specimen on the right, the program had to break lines earlier than necessary even as far back as the very first line in the paragraph. That is, it had to calculate line breaking for the whole paragraph rather than a line-by-line fashion that Publisher uses as its only option.

That is what leads me to the conclusion that balanced ragged lines is an extension of the concept of a multiline composer. I do not know whether this is inherently so, but it does seem to be the case at least in InDesign, as evidenced by the fact that the balance ragged lines setting does nothing at all if "Adobe Single Line Composer" is activated rather than the "Adobe Paragraph Composer."

This does not give me much hope, as so far Serif has not seemed interested in a multiline composer as far as their public comments are concerned–but I do realize and accept that they are not in the habit of publicly commenting on desired features until they show up in beta.

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  • 5 months later...

Hello, is there any official statement on the topic of multiline composer concept integration? This seems to me like another one of the must have missing features – especially for professionals.

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2 hours ago, MarekGFX said:

Hello, is there any official statement on the topic of multiline composer concept integration?

Hi @MarekGFX,

no, there isn't. Serif usually does not comment on feature requests or any planned features that are not part of the official beta versions.

d.

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