InDesign Advanced Typographical Controls

Find out about the Paragraph Composer and Single Line Composer. Control hyphenation and more.

One of InDesign’s strongest points is its typographic controls. I don’t know of a better layout program in this respect. In this InDesign Tip, we will start covering some of the typographic features. I will cover most of them with several articles.

Adobe Paragraph and Single-Line Composers

Let’s have a look at the menu of the Paragraph palette. There are two options I would like you to look at right now. The first one is the Adobe Paragraph Composer. This is a paragraph attribute which lets InDesign look at your paragraphs and then decide where to break the lines of text within that paragraph in order to improve spacing between the words. It will also result in less hyphenated words where the option hyphenate is checked. This option is on by default when you open an new InDesign document.

Paragraph Palette’s Menu (enlarged version)

The Paragraph composer is a very good option to use. However there are times where you might want to turn it off. One of them is when you import QuarkXPress documents into InDesign CS (by the way you can only import QuarkXPress documents up to version 4.x). As Quark does not have this type of control, once you import a document from that program, you might notice differences in how the text has been treated by InDesign.

Another reason to turn off the Paragraph Composer, would be that it simply keeps breaking a line of text where you don’t want it to be broken. So you just turn it off.

The second option I would like you to look at is the Adobe Single-Line Composer. As you have probably guessed, this option looks at your lines of text one by one instead of looking at the overall paragraph spacing.

You can explore the differences amongst these options simply by drawing a text box and then fill it with placeholder text. With the text frame selected, first apply the Adobe Paragraph Composer and then the Single-Line Composer. You will notice that the lines will break differently.

Other Typography Controls

Have another look at the Paragraph palette’s menu. There are a few more controls I would like you to look at. I won’t go over all of them, but you are free to try them by your own.

Balance Ragged Lines: Well, this command does … what it says! Apply to the text frame you drew just before to see its effects.

Hyphenation: This command leads you to another window called Hyphenation Settings.
The window is quite self-explanatory. It allows you to control when the words will break, how many consecutive hyphens you want to have, etc.

Hyphenation Settings window (enlarged version)

Let’s have a look at the different options in this window.

Words with at least: _ letters: InDesign will only hyphenate words that have at least the number of letters you specify in this option.

After the first: _ letters: InDesign will only hyphenate words after the first number of letters you have specified. For example, if you enter the number 3, the word specified will break spe-cified.

Before last: _ letters: InDesign will only hyphenate words before the number of letters you have specified. If we take the word specified again and we enter the number 4 it can break as spe-cified or speci-fied, but never specifi-ed.

Hyphen limit: _ hyphens: With this option you can decide the maximum number of consecutive hyphens. If enter 0, then you will tell InDesign that you can have an unlimited number of consecutive hyphens.

Hyphenation Zone: This is the amount of white space which you allow before InDesign starts to hyphenate. To explain this better, let’s take this example. If you specify 10 mm, it means that between the last word on the line and the margin of your text box, you can have up to 10 mm of white space. If going onto the next line with the next word leaves only a white space of 10 mm or less, then InDesign will make that word go to the next line without hyphenating it. However, if simply going onto the next line without hyphenating the word, will leave more than 10 mm of white space, InDesign will hyphenate the word. This is a way to prevent very jagged paragraphs. This option works only with the Adobe Single-Line Composer enabled. The Adobe Paragraph Composer does these kind of calculations by itself and looks also at other factors when breaking your lines of text.

Under all these options you have a slider which allows you to change the ratio between better spacing and fewer hyphens. The more you move it to the left, towards better spacing, the more hyphens you will have, within whatever values you set in the options explained above. To the contrary, the more you move the slider to the right, towards fewer hyphens, the ,ess hyphens you will have, but you will also get not so good spacing.

The typographical controls I explained here are not all of InDesign’s controls. However if you start using these and you master them, you will already get into more advanced typography; These controls are beyond the level of a beginner if used wisely. InDesign’s is capable of doing some neat things with Open Type fonts. But those options are really something that at this stage you don’t really need to know.