Justifying some texts causes big spaces between words

users
#1

Is there a reason why when I justify some texts, automatically there are
big spaces between words?

Thanks

Daniel

#2

wild guess: are you permitting automatic hyphenation? If you can't hyphenate, then some lines may have excess spacing. OTOH, is the spacing
also wide between letters? If it's not wider than usual on the problem lines, then the justification routine is not working right.

--doug

#3

Well, only the obvious one that the first word on the next line is too long to fit on the problem line. Without justification, this would lead to a large space at the end of the line; with justification, you will of course see larger spaces than on other lines. The problem will show up more with large font sizes or in narrow measures - or, indeed, in languages with longer words!

You can avoid this by choosing to hyphenate the first word on the subsequent line. You can do this in various ways:

o You can set automatic hyphenation on the Text Flow tab of either the paragraph or paragraph style dialogue. You may need to tinker with settings at Tools | Options... | Language Settings | Writing Aids for this to work as you wish.

o You can adjust any rogue lines by hyphenating specific words manually. With the cursor at your chosen break, go to Insert | Formatting Mark > | Optional hyphen (or use Ctrl+Hyphen).

o You can apply the previous effect automatically by selecting any regions of text and using Tools | Language > | Hyphenation... . Unlike the first technique, this inserts optional hyphens, which you can remove piecemeal if you wish.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#4

Other choices: experiment with the line length, the font, and the font size.

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
If kerning issues such as this really bother you then you might be better
using a DeskTop Publishing program such as Scribus (Free). Apparently the
best work-flow is to;
1. use LibreOffice Writer to write/create and/or edit/modify the contents
Once you have pretty much all the words on the page(s) then
2. open the file in Scribus and use it's fancy tools to do the layout

I have not done this myself and only opened Scribus really briefly once or
twice but got no further than that. One day i hope to have a really good
go with it!

It is worth bearing in mind that very few people notice even really
hideously bad kerning. You'll probably notice it in adverts on tele,
street signs, marketing materials even from big glossy companies. Even
newspapers and magazines are quite happy to suffer the increased costs per
print-run rather than continue to pay for expertise to sort out such
issues. People have grown so familiar with appallingly bad gaffs through
the wide-spread use of Word that they don't notice kerning issues.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Other choices: turn on automatic hyphenation (which I don't recommend) or manually do Insert > Formatting Mark > Optional hyphen in strategically chosen words (i.e., first words in lines after lines with very big spaces). You may need to use a dictionary to figure out the correct places for hyphens in words.