He justified his text by varying character widths, as he had learned from studying the work of scribes.
TURN OFF WIDOWS AND ORPHANS IN WORD SOFTWARE
You can successfully justify text without uneven color and with minimal or no hyphenation by using your ultra-modern software to emulate what the traditional scribes did by hand: vary the space between individual characters and the widths of the characters themselves.
InDesign gives you much more flexibility. You need to average 60 or more characters per line for justified text, more if you turn off hyphenation (and even then, you'll run into problems here and there).įine Tuning: Justification, by default, varies only the spaces between words, a hangover from the days of metal type when there wasn't much choice. A narrow column of justified text (less than, say, 15 to 17 times the point size, depending on the typeface) will not set evenly without hyphenation except through very hard work and a lot of luck. Line width: Whether you can avoid hyphenation and still maintain even text color depends on the width of your measure (how long the line is) and the typeface. (TIP: You can prevent a word from ever hyphenating by setting it to "".) You change this under Advanced Character Formats in the Style dialogs. You're using an English version of InDesign, but the default International English dictionary will NOT hyphenate your language correctly. Language: Hyphenation requires the language of the text to be identified correctly.
No hyphenation also tends to leave you in trouble when you have widows and orphans to deal with. As Lauren says, you can simply uncheck Hyphenation in the Paragraph panel or in the Hyphenation section of your Paragraph Style, but don't be too quick to throw away the hyphens.