Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
When I said spacing, I actually meant leading. Many good paperbacks are printed with around 50cpl (sometimes less) and can manage word spacing and hyphenation admirably. In fact, with most of the typefaces I used, I noticed that word spacing inconsistencies were significantly more obvious at 8.5pt than with 10pt, and it was easier to minimize hyphenation at the larger size as well.
The problem comes at the bottom of the page when set to eliminate widows and orphans. A 1-2 line gap and ragged bottom works fine if you have a big enough bottom margin to conceal it, but without that margin, there's a very jarring effect to the extra space. With smaller typefaces, you can adjust the leading a little bit here or there and keep the top and bottom of the pages relatively uniform. With larger fonts, it's not so easy to conceal that gap at the bottom of some pages. If the screen's aspect ratio were closer to 9:16, a line gap at the bottom would be a much smaller proportion of visible white space, and would also permit more lines of text (and thus enhance the effect of tiny leading adjustments), but with 3:4, it's quite hard to correct. Of course, I'm not a master typographer, so perhaps I'm just ignorant of a good method to resolve the issue.
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This conversation has kind of hijacked this thread, but it's interesting nonetheless. The bottom line widow/orphan issue has bothered me trememdously, too. I even spent some time experimenting with setting the page text frame to a full vertical justification, and that obviously caused endless problems with excessive line spacing on many pages and it just wasn't worth the effort. I couldn't figure out a way for InDesign to adjust the line spacing for multiple pages at once - it would only adjust line spacing on an individual page basis. Ultimately, I decided to just deal with a ragged bottom margin until InDesign or TeX can develop a true chapter-level formatting). I set InDesign to ignore orphans but avoid widows, and that minimizes the raggedness for the most part.
I don't suppose you've ever heard if Adobe has chapter-level formatting on the drawing board? I don't know if Knuth is ever planning to do that with TeX. Even just a way to have full vertical justification coupled with a chapter-level line spacing adjustment would be great. I wonder if anyone makes an after-market plug-in for that?