Spacing between characters too large when using line justification !!!!

What you can play with is the Character Spacing (in the Inspector > Text), font selection and hyphenation. For hyphenation, you can let Pages take care of it (Inspector > Document > Hyphenate), or you can do it yourself by typing a hyphen where you want to break a word.

It should not be worse in Pages than other applications, but it may look different. I think Word simply increases the space between the words, something that is not always pretty either. If it looks ugly in Pages, I would guess that the main problem is too many long and not hyphenated words.

Hello

Some apps default to "hyphenation ON", others default to "hyphenation OFF".

Pages did the second option.

You may create your own template with "hyphenation ON" and use it as starting point.

As I am curious and adventurous, I made changes in the "in thebox" templates.

In the Index.xml file I simply replaced

<sl:kSFWPAutoHyphenationProperty><sl:number sfa:number=" 0" sfa:type="c"/></sl:kSFWPAutoHyphenationProperty>

by

<sl:kSFWPAutoHyphenationProperty><sl:number sfa:number=" 1" sfa:type="c"/></sl:kSFWPAutoHyphenationProperty>

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 9 mars 2008 11:57:3)

musik wrote:
Word and Mellel increase the spacing between the words and keep the spacing between the characters constant. Pages does it the opposite way. It increases the spacing between the characters and not between the words. I think that is not the best way to handle that.

In some cases it is certainly not the best way, but it depends on the context. A program like InDesign gives the user the ability to set a maximum for how much space between characters in a word can expand, and also how much each individual character can be stretched out. But to get that flexibility one has to pay for InDesign and the price is about 10 times the price of iWork.

Hello

In fact the difference on this point is that one defaults to ON the other defaults to OFF.

It's just a choice which neither linked to price nor to authors's competence.

I don't know if you may disable the automatic hyphenation in Mellel but I know that you may activate it in Pages.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 9 mars 2008 15:16:1)

There is no doubt that Mellel is a much better application than Pages in a lot of areas. It has been around for longer, it is more mature and it is actively maintained. Pages is of course better in a lot of other areas - and there is room for both on the market.

Mellel handles hyphenation in a much more advanced way than Pages and it has support for example for soft-hyphens, editable hyphenation dictionaries and hyphenation zones - something Pages lacks.

When it comes to the large space between characters, however, I cannot say that Mellel has invested a lot in making it look good. They just chose the simplest solution, just like MS Word, to increase space between words - not between characters. They even use this as an example of something ugly in Mellel's own user guide: "For example, the following text is fully justified but not hyphenated. The spaces between the words look wide and make the text look quite ugly."

As mentioned before, in some cases increasing space between words is the most pleasing solution to the eye. In some cases adding some space between characters is more pleasing, and that is the reason why Apple went to the extra trouble of adding that functionality. In many cases, it is not obvious which way is best, and people will have diverging opinions.

I think that a basic problem here has nothing to do with specific word editors, or with the technqiues on how they handle line justification.

I worked in a publishing company, starting in 1951, when all printing was done by "hot metal." In those days if the book was set by one method, the spacing was between words, but the other method placed the spacing between the letters. BOTH methods produced some very ugly lines.

Our solution was to add (or cut) an innocuous word. (You can't do this with an exact quote, but you CAN do it most of the time.) I was working with text books for elementary and high school pupils, so we had to be very careful that information was never changed, but we could manipulate the way the information was worded.

Also, we always sent first galleys to the authors to read, so if such a word change disturbed an author, we were able to go back to the original. But the word change process solved many an ugly line.

This technique is even easier on a computer, because you get instant feedback on the changes.

Sue

Hello

When I want to get a correct display, I test several soluces.

Often I try with hyphenation ON then I I adjust the character spacing.

If I am not satisfied, I put hyphenation for the paragraph (yes there is such a feature in Pages)



and try to work only with character spacing.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 9 mars 2008 21:52:54)

musik,

I just ran a test using 1,2,3 and 4 columns and several different typefaces and a variety of point sizes, with hyphenation on and off. In all cases, space was added between words. In no case was space added between characters, at least not noticeably. (I'm using Pages 3.0.2. and OS X.4.11)

I wonder why the difference in our experiences.

Walt