From the course: InDesign Secrets
367 The line breaks of Paragraph Composer - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
367 The line breaks of Paragraph Composer
- [Instructor] This tip is, I guess you'd say, not so much a tip as it is some insight that can help you understand how InDesign breaks lines in paragraphs. I find that a lot of users aren't aware of the existence of the paragraph composer and what that means. If you already know all about it, then I might have a couple tips toward the end of this video for you, but for everybody else, let me explain what I'm talking about. Look at this paragraph here. I've zoomed in and I know that a lot of users would say, look at this line here. "If a door must be crossed, the wire may either." Why is the word be on this line when there is plenty of room for the word be on that line? It drives them crazy and then they end up doing things like this and then tracking it in to get things to fit, or they click in front of a word and they enter line breaks, also called soft returns. I'm gonna press Shift + Enter, or Shift + Return here, but look at what happened. Not only did that line change and the one underneath it, but the line above changed. I'll do that again, watch. What the heck? That drives a lot of users crazy, because they are accustomed to making a change in a line and then only that line would change and that might cascade to successive lines up to the end of the paragraph, but it would never change the lines above. InDesign does that all the time. If I went over here to the word wire and I just started adding some characters, even that changed it. Any time that you make any kind of edit that you add letters, remove letters, enter soft line breaks or hyphenation, even if you make a word bold, sometimes that would cause that line to wrap differently. Not only will that line and possibly further lines change, but the entire paragraph might change. Why is this? This is all because of the paragraph composer and believe it or not, it's a feature, not a bug. What's happening is that the paragraph composer is the default way that InDesign composes paragraphs, breaks lines in any paragraph style that you use. Right now, this paragraph is body_text_indent_main_style and if we edit it and come down to justification, you can see the composer is the Adobe paragraph composer. The single-line composer is the one that most of us are used to. That means that only that line will change, will break differently, once I edit it. If I edit a single line, only that line will change and possibly the ones after it. The paragraph composer recomposes the entire paragraph with every edit. Every other program on the planet uses the single-line composer, Microsoft Word, PageMaker, QuarkXPres, whatever. InDesign uses a paragraph composer and it's very intelligent. What's happening is that every time you make an edit, the paragraph composer looks at your settings for hyphenation. Here, hyphenation is turned on and here are all of the parameters and justification. What is your desired word spacing, letter spacing, and so on and how much scooch room does it have between minimum and maximum? It recasts the entire paragraph, all of the line endings, to best fit those parameters and, this is important, to make the smoothest rag on the right. That is why apparently in InDesign's computer brain, it has decided if the word be was on this line, then the rest of the paragraph would look dumb. To make a smooth rag, it pushed the word be here. If you wanna see what it would look like if you didn't have the paragraph composer running, you can simply click inside the paragraph and come to this menu in the control panel and choose single-line composer. This is an override for this paragraph. Ah, look at that, the word be moved up. Now, we have big areas right here. What's happening is that though the paragraph composer might make what you think are questionable decisions, there is a method to its madness and if you let the paragraph composer do its thing, you're going to have much smoother rags and you're going to spend much less time going through line-by-line trying to create a smooth rag.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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