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.