- [Instructor] Currently the body text in this document
is left aligned or ragged, meaning that it's asymmetrical.
This means there's an uneven amount of space
on the right edge of the text columns.
Let's change the alignment of the body text to justified.
I'll edit the body style,
indents and spacing alignment, left justify.
We now have symmetrical blocks of type.
To a large extent, the alignment of your body text
is a matter of personal preference,
and it's not unusual to combine both alignments
in the same document.
With the justified type being used for the main running text
and the left align type for the supporting text
as well as for headlines and subheads.
As well as being symmetrical,
justified text is also more economical.
That is you can fit more words.
The price we pay for a flush right edge is the varying size
of the spaces between the words.
Our challenge is to make sure this variation
in word spacing is as imperceptible as possible.
So it's not just a matter of changing alignment,
but also of changing the justification settings,
the hyphenation settings,
and working with optical margin alignment.
I'll revisit the body paragraph style
and come to the justification settings.
Actually, before I do this,
let me turn on my guides by pressing W
and you can see that when I do so,
I now have a lot of yellow highlighting.
This yellow highlighting is a composition preference,
H and J violations.
And it's showing me
where InDesign can't honor the justification
and hyphenation settings that I'm choosing.
It doesn't exactly equate to bad spacing, but more or less.
So we want to see if we can remove as much
of this yellow highlighting as possible.
I'll come and make some modifications to the body style.
In the justification settings,
we have this important group of numbers.
Currently the justification is achieved
just through the word spacing.
I'm going to have the letter spacing do some
of the work as well, allowing it to vary between minus two
and plus two with the desired remaining at zero.
Also the glyph scaling, the very slight adjustment
in horizontal scale of the characters.
I'm going to allow this to vary between 98%
and 102% with the desired remaining at 100.
And you can see that with my preview turned on,
we now have much less yellow highlighting.
The second change I will make will be in the hyphenation.
I want my text to hyphenate
because hyphenation is a compromise
and get more from it than we lose.
Ideally, your text wouldn't hyphenate,
but the price of that is bad word spacing.
As indicated by this sliding scale,
you can have better spacing or you can have fewer hyphens.
You can't have both.
Now, if you hyphenate with some discretion,
then it's a price worth paying.
So I am going to increase this number.
I'm still hyphenating, but not as many words.
And I also would like to take my slider
and move that all the way over to the left.
In terms of these check boxes,
I'm going to turn off hyphenate last word
and hyphenate across column.
And we see that having made those changes,
there are far fewer lines that are now highlighted
in yellow.
Yes, there will always be some,
especially when working with narrower text columns,
but we want to minimize the amount of highlighting.
The third change that I want to make is
to turn on an option called optical margin alignment.
I'll turn my guides off for a moment
and put my text cursor inside the story
or just select the text frame.
Then come to the type of menu and to story.
You'll notice right here where my cursor is moving,
I have a hyphen when I check optical margin alignment,
that hyphen will move to the right edge of the frame,
sticking slightly beyond the right edge.
And that visually sharpens up the edge of the text frame.
The number that you want to put in here should correspond
to the size of your body text
or the text that is in the frame.
In my case, that's nine points.
So having made those important modifications
to the justification settings, the hyphenation settings,
and turning on optical margin alignment,
I now have much more evenly spaced, justified type.