Typographic Solutions?

[Karen Robbins]

My project has thousands of class listings in justified columns that 
permit up to four hyphenated lines in a row. The class title is a 
run-in paragraph in 7-point Helvetica bold; the class description 
paragraph is 7-point Helvetica (fonts/styles simplified for brevity).

1. When a title is shorter than one full line and a description 
either fits one short word on that first line or doesn't begin until 
the second line, there is often a large gap at the end of the first 
line. Changing spread and/or stretch often doesn't succeed until 
readability is sacrificed, and takes too much time to fix by hand for 
thousands of entries. Any way to more automatically reduce or 
eliminate this gap?

2. The last word of a description is usually the word "grading." Too 
often, it creates an "ing." widow/orphan (depending on your 
definition) on the last line of the paragraph. Because type is very 
small and set fairly tightly, it's tough to eliminate this--and 
impossible to hand-fix thousands of times. Increasing the number of 
characters required in a hyphenated suffix would result in more 
and/or larger internal gaps. Any way to reduce frequency of this 
problem?

3. The styles allow line breaks after a slash (as set in Text 
Options). But when the slash is in "P/NP" or "S/U" a line break looks 
bad and affects readability. Forcing it to the next line creates a 
short line above, plus it's an impractical 
hand-fix-thousands-of-times. Any way to allow line breaks at slashes 
but exempt these two cases?

FM9 (moving to v11 soon) on Virtual PC Windows 7.

Many Thanks,
Karen