forced line breaks, URLs, and justified text

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:07:55 -0700, "Tina Ricks" 
<kristina.ricks at verizon.net> wrote:

>Would love some help with forced line breaks in justified text.
>The text is justified (not my choice, it's what the client wants). 
>This is a textbook, and there are a lot of references to URLs.

Thinking outside the box a bit...  If this book is distributed
as a PDF, or in HTML, you could tuck the URLs into hypertext
markers, and put text that breaks normally in as the hotspot.
That would make links clickable, which they may not be if the
URL is just plain text.

If it's print-only, you could consider using footnotes for the
URLs.  That would look normal for a textbook, and since each
one starts a new line, would eliminate most linebreak issues.
Where needed, you could put in discretionary hyphens, or forced
line breaks, and the lack of justification in a footnote would
not be likely to be noticed...  Once you made such a tweak, it
would not need to be changed later, so the maintenance issue
goes away too.

Just a thought...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/