Controlling line breaks with Every-line Composer options

- As you work with paragraph text, you'll often encounter line breaks where one text line wraps to the next. Sometimes with hyphenation, this is really obvious. Other times, it just doesn't feel balanced. And rather than you having to go through and add hard returns where you think the line breaks should be, Photoshop has a useful tool called the Line Composer. Now, earlier I had turned off hyphenation. Let me select this for a second, and enable it for just a moment under paragraph. And I'll tell it to hyphenate. And you see that it hyphenated nonconformists and brotherhood.

Well, as we adjust the size here of the text, you'll see that it flows differently, and it will wrap to the next line. However, under the Paragraph option, here, there's an important choice. By default, Photoshop looks at each line individually, and tries to balance out the characters. But if you choose Every Line Composer, it evaluates each line of text, and tries to create an optical flow for the entire paragraph. So you'll notice there, for example, that the word who wrapped.

In this case, with Every Line Composer, it's adjusted the spacing between words to try to get a nice, overall, balance. I like that. I'll turn off hyphenation, there. And it's pretty nicely balanced. As we adjust the point size, you'll see that the text re-flows. And when you release, the overall spacing may still adjust slightly because of that Every Line Composer choice. I think this should be the default option. It's quite useful. And what it does is, it balances out the text, making it as readable as possible.

Alright, that looks pretty good. Let's just put a slight edge on that. Under the effects panel, here, I'll choose to add a small drop shadow, just to increase the readability. There we go. And we'll apply a small stroke, as well, setting that to the outside at two pixels. And click OK. We've now got very readable text of this quotation. And I'm quite satisfied.

Now if I decided to add a quote mark, let's revisit something from earlier. We'll put the quote marks in. And you'll notice that it's indenting on the text. Well, that could be quite easy to change. Remember earlier, under the Paragraph panel, we had Spacing. So I can go to the Paragraph panel here, and instead, out-dent that first line. We'll tell this to be negative 50. And you see that it moves it.

Let's back that off a little bit to negative 40. And that looks good. So now, that quote was moved to the left of where I first clicked. And we have the text properly aligned, but the quote marks are falling in the right positions. Alright, that's lookin' pretty good. Let's explore a couple more choices.