RE: Justified versus ragged right? (take II)

["Sean Brierley" <sbrierley -at- Accu-Time -dot- com>]

So, is the art of fully-justified paragraphs justifiable for technical
writing, $100 textbooks, etc., in your opinion.

That is, if my content is great and my design is decent, I don't have
the time or resources to tweak formatting on a line or even paragraph
level. 

In FrameMaker, I do edit my hyphenation dictionary, but only as it
applies to all my documents. I do not adjust hyphenation on a local,
ad-hoc, or case-by-case basis. Not sure how to do this or even handle
kerning and tracking in Word.

Thoughts as it applies to fully-justified text and ragged right?

Cheers,

Sean


-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hart [mailto:ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 11:53 AM
To: TECHWR-L List; Sean Brierley
Subject: Justified versus ragged right? (take II)


Sean Brierley wondered: <<Are you typesetting--adjusting the spaces  
between words and letters and the hyphenation of words--on a line-by- 
line, paragraph, or document basis?>>

Yes. <g> In practice, what I do is play with the hyphenation and  
justification settings when I first define the paragraph styles, and  
apply those globally before I begin layout. If there are any  
recurring problems, I edit the styles and try again until things are  
basically good.

Next, as I proofread the layout (on the screen initially, in print  
finally if the manuscript will be published in printed form), I  
manually override any automated decisions that simply didn't work.  
InDesign, for instance, has some nutty notions about where to break  
words, and I haven't made time to edit their hyphenation dictionary  
or create a custom dictionary containing all my own word breaks. Some  
day when I have a few hours!
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