On 04/10/2012 3:36 PM, Karen Robbins wrote:
My project has thousands of class listings in justified columns that
permit up to four hyphenated lines in a row. The class title is a
run-in paragraph in 7-point Helvetica bold; the class description
paragraph is 7-point Helvetica (fonts/styles simplified for brevity).
1. When a title is shorter than one full line and a description either
fits one short word on that first line or doesn't begin until the
second line, there is often a large gap at the end of the first line.
Changing spread and/or stretch often doesn't succeed until readability
is sacrificed, and takes too much time to fix by hand for thousands of
entries. Any way to more automatically reduce or eliminate this gap?
2. The last word of a description is usually the word "grading." Too
often, it creates an "ing." widow/orphan (depending on your
definition) on the last line of the paragraph. Because type is very
small and set fairly tightly, it's tough to eliminate this--and
impossible to hand-fix thousands of times. Increasing the number of
characters required in a hyphenated suffix would result in more and/or
larger internal gaps. Any way to reduce frequency of this problem?
3. The styles allow line breaks after a slash (as set in Text
Options). But when the slash is in "P/NP" or "S/U" a line break looks
bad and affects readability. Forcing it to the next line creates a
short line above, plus it's an impractical
hand-fix-thousands-of-times. Any way to allow line breaks at slashes
but exempt these two cases?
Tough problems!
A suggestion for number 3:
1. Disallow line breaks after slashes.
2. Create a character tag "2pt" set to As-is except for font size 2 pt.
3. Create a variable, "slash-space" consisting of
/<2pt>\i
which will create a slash followed by a 2pt thin space (virtually
invisible).
4. Create a variable, "PNP" consisting of
P/NP
and another, "SU" consisting of
S/U
5. Insert the PNP variable somewhere and cut it to clipboard.
6. Find/Change All Text P/NP By Pasting.
7. Repeat (5) and (6) with the SU variable.
8. Insert the slash-space variable somewhere and cut it to clipboard.
9. Find Change all slashes By Pasting.
Now the ordinary slashes will look normal but break at line ends because
of the tiny thin space following them, while your two exceptions will not.
Maybe someone else can think of a simpler way...?
For problem 2, I don't have time to test this, but perhaps a character
tag "no-lang" set to As-is except for language None could be used to
format a variable containing "grading" -- that might have the effect of
suppressing hyphenation??
HTH,
--
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
3781 Victoria Park Avenue, Unit 3
Toronto, ON, Canada M1W 3K5
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325
http://www.phoenix-geophysics.com
_______________________________________________
You are currently subscribed to framers as [email protected].
Send list messages to [email protected].
To unsubscribe send a blank email to
[email protected]
or visit
http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com
Send administrative questions to [email protected]. Visit
http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
