aligning bottom text in book - Adobe Indesign

The easiest way to make your pages justify automatically is to set the
frames to justify vertically.

But easiest is not necessarily best. Indesign's VJ is indiscriminate. It
just spreads the space between all the lines without regard for what
they are. Typically, if you need to add space in a page to justify it,
you try to add space above heads, around extracts and lists. Basically,
you add space where there is already space added. Usually you don't add
space between lines of text, or if you do, you add very little space.

The best way is to set up your page and your styles so that all styles
use a multiple (or maybe half) of the lead and that a certain number of
lines of regular text add up to exactly the depth of the page.

So, for example, if your regular text is 10/12, and you need a subhead,
make a style for the subhead and make it so that all the space in the
subhead adds up to exactly X lines of regular text. The subhead could be
11/12 caps, bold, with 16 extra pts above and 8 extra pts below (12 + 16
+ 8 = 36 pts, or exactly 3 lines). If you need a style for an extract,
you might choose to make the extract 9/12, indented 3p on both sides,
with 6 extra pts above and below the extract. Again, the 6 pts above and
below add up to exactly one line of space. This system means that most
of your pages will justify by themselves. If an extract breaks across a
page, then the page will be 6 pts short, so you might have to move
something around on the facing page to make it match. And if a subhead
begins at the top of a page, you'll have to add some space somewhere in
the page to make up for the missing 4 pts (8 pts below).

What you want to avoid is mixing spacing. Don't use 10/12 for text, 9/11
for extracts, and 11/13 for subheads. Don't use autoleading (because it
will adjust for things like superscripts). Play around with the First
Baseline options in Text Frame Options until you find a setting that
lands the first baseline at the same depth (use a guideline) regardless
of whether it's 10 pt or 11 pt or whether it's got a superscript in it.

If you're keeping 2 lines together at beginning or end of page (in Keep
Options), then you're going to get pages that are still one line short.
In this case, you have to decide whether there's somewhere on the page
you can add a full line of space, or whether you can track a paragraph
to gain or lose a line, or whether you might just run the facing page
one line short (or one line long) so they match.

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

Once you have investigated and rejected the "vertical justification"
feature, you will be forced to agree that the answer to your question is No.
You have to do it manually.

Ariel

While Kenneth and Ariel are correct, InDesign's vertical justification is very primitive. No one mentioned that you can set the paragraph spacing limit to a high number. This will make sure InDesign never changes the amount of space in between lines, only in between paragraphs.

Fred_Goldman@adobeforums.com wrote:
> you can set the paragraph spacing limit to a high number. This will
> make sure InDesign never changes the amount of space in between
> lines, only in between paragraphs.


This doesn't make it any more useful for me. If I have six paragraphs on
a page, one of them is a subhead and the rest are text paragraphs, I
don't want to spread out the extra space between all six paragraphs. I
want to add the extra space above the subhead only.

Until VJ is controllable at the paragraph style level, I'll live without it.

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

I agree with Ken that ID's v. justification is basically useless for my book
design work as it stands.

Ariel
www.FreelanceBookDesign.com

I think you guys covered vertical justification pretty well, so I on't add to that discussion, but the OP mentioned PageMaker's abilities.

If memory serves, PM had a "balance columns" feature that would adjust the lengths of multiple columns to keep the bottom of the group as even as possible. ID has no native ability to do this on it's own, but Teus de Jong wrote a little script that adjusts the frame height of a multi-column frame to balance that - very useful for things like newspaper layout where you work with modular blocks of text.



if (app.version == 3){
theframe = app.selection[0].parentTextFrame.endTextFrame;
} else
theframe = app.selection[0].parentTextFrames[0].endTextFrame;



nroflines = theframe.lines.length;
nrofcolumns = theframe.textColumns.length;
halfway = Math.round(nroflines / nrofcolumns);
// better not compare floats, so we multiply by 10
if (Math.round((nroflines / nrofcolumns) * 10) > (halfway*10)){

halfway += 1;
}
newbottom = theframe.lines[halfway - 1].baseline;
bounds = theframe.geometricBounds;
bounds[2] = newbottom;
theframe.geometricBounds = bounds;



There are a couple of caveats. It only works on a standalone story or if the frame is the last in a thread (for obvious reasons), and you need an active text cursor somewhere in the frame. In addition, it will not move any text into an available empty column in a frame, but will balance just the columns that have text already, and finally, it doesn't do well dealing with odd situations like text-wrapping or non-rectangular shapes.

Other than that, it's really pretty nifty and mimics the behavior of PM quite closely.

Peter

Thanks Ariel appreciate your taking the time. Jim Chapralis

Thanks, Peter.
It might be easier for me to do a page by page adjustment.
Thanks for your help.
Jim Chapralis

As I said, that script is only useful if you have multi-column frames. For typical book work, align to grid and careful use of leading and spacing is the way to go.

Peter