Typographic Solutions?

[Stuart Rogers]

On 04/10/2012 3:36 PM, Karen Robbins wrote:
> 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?
>

Tough problems!

A suggestion for number 3:
1. Disallow line breaks after slashes.
2. Create a character tag "2pt" set to As-is except for font size 2 pt.
3. Create a variable, "slash-space" consisting of
    /<2pt>\i
    which will create a slash followed by a 2pt thin space (virtually 
invisible).
4. Create a variable, "PNP" consisting of
    P/NP
    and another, "SU" consisting of
    S/U
5. Insert the PNP variable somewhere and cut it to clipboard.
6. Find/Change All  Text P/NP By Pasting.
7. Repeat (5) and (6) with the SU variable.
8. Insert the slash-space variable somewhere and cut it to clipboard.
9. Find Change all slashes By Pasting.

Now the ordinary slashes will look normal but break at line ends because 
of the tiny thin space following them, while your two exceptions will not.

Maybe someone else can think of a simpler way...?

For problem 2, I don't have time to test this, but perhaps a character 
tag "no-lang" set to As-is except for language None could be used to 
format a variable containing "grading" -- that might have the effect of 
suppressing hyphenation??

HTH,

-- 
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
3781 Victoria Park Avenue, Unit 3
Toronto, ON, Canada  M1W 3K5
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325

http://www.phoenix-geophysics.com