Re: word spacing & justification

[Thomas Neuburger <thomasn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Victor,

I'm glad you brought this up, because I think you've uncovered a bug in the 
program.

The spacing behavior you noted (where the last line of a paragraph seems to 
use different letter-spacing rules than the others) is true of both 
justified and unjustified paragraphs, at least in my experience, with the 
fonts I tend to use.

This is quite frustrating when a monospaced font is selected precisely 
because of the alignment, for example, with well-formatted code. With both 
Courier and Courier New, the last line doesn't line up properly.

I'm sure there's a typographic reason for this behavior in Justified 
paragraphs (and I'm also sure it's the one you noted--that when text 
doesn't reach the right margin, it doesn't need to be "justified").

But why this behavior in Right- and Left-Aligned paragraphs?

Perhaps one of the type-meisters (or code-meisters) at Adobe could comment?

Thanks for bringing this up.

Best,

Tom Neuburger

The Masters Series: FrameMaker 6
ISBN 1-930597-01-0
On sale at www.fatbrain.com



>Subject: word spacing & justification
>From: Victor Caston <vcaston@ucdavis.edu>
>Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 22:54:23 -0700
>X-Message-Number: 36
>
>What happens to word spacing on the *last* line of a justified paragraph?
>
>Does it automatically go to the "optimum" spacing setting from the
>Advanced Properties of the paragraph style, as one would expect? And
>is there anyway to control the spacing on the last line independently
>of the rest?
>
>(Couldn't find anything on this right off in the manual or in
>Neuburger's FrameMaker 6.)
>
>
>I ask this because I've recently had the impression, while looking at
>professionally typeset books, that the last line in justified
>paragraphs often looks a little tighter.
>
>In fact, when I tried to reproduce one of the pages in FrameMaker, I
>could only get an exact fit on a light table by adding hard spaces
>between virtually all of the words of the paragraph's last line.
>(With a few interesting exceptions: before the capital letter of a
>proper noun; between final 't' and initial 'h'; and so on.)
>
>I looked in Bringhurst's Elements, but despite feelings of deja vu,
>didn't turn up anything.
>
>
>Many thanks for any typographical illumination!
>
>
>Victor Caston
>University of California, Davis


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