(Looking for) Old discussion about »best« justification settings

Question

Hi there!
I seem to remember there once was a vivid discussion about the best working justification settings in the old days of this forum – about 2 or 3 years ago, I would guess. Quoting »justification settings« I mean this tricky palette with minimum, desired and maximum values for word spacing, letter spacing, glyph scaling etc. I believe it was Dave Saunders among others taking part in that discussion ...
Well, the forum search didn’t help me a lot. Is there a chance to find any old discussion here at all?
Cheers,
Klaus

Answer 1

I have archives which are not on the forums any longer. I didn't find a post from Dave, but here's some posts from others...
Ole Kvern:
Fellow InDesigners,
For whatever it's worth, I start with:
Word Spacing: 95 / 100/ 140
I never use any letter spacing or glyph scaling (so those settings are at 0/0/0 and 100/100/100, respectively). I turn on optical kerning and use the paragraph composer. I put fairly tight limits on hyphenation.
This approach will sometimes result in overly-wide word spacing, but I've found that a.) wide word spacing is easy to find and fix, and b.) the reader's eye is less sensitive to variation in word spacing than it is to variation in letter spacing.
I look at every line in the book. No matter what your spacing settings are, nothing absolves you from this responsibility.
I think it works pretty well. Your mileage may vary.:-)
Kenneth Benson:
The "right" values for these settings depends on typeface, size, column
width, hyphenation settings, and the phase of the moon, but most books
use something close to 100% for Desired, something less than but close
to Desired for Minimum, and something greater than Desired for Maximum.
I'm looking at a book now that uses a 27p wide column, 10/12 Sabon, with
Justification settings at 80/100/133, but in this same spec I've seen
90/115/200 and 75/95/150. You need to give the program a range in which
to work; if you tell it to use 100/100/100, all the spaces will be
exactly the same size. The narrower the column, the bigger the type, the
more restrictive the hyphenation settings, the more generous you should
be with min/max settings. The wider the column, the smaller the type,
the less restrictive the hyphenation settings, the more restrictive you
can be with min/max settings. In the end, it comes down to what looks
best. Try a variety of settings on one page of justified type, and then
pick the one that looks the most readable.
Dominic Hurley:
Depends on the font (which is another point to consider - not all digital fonts with the same name have the same metrics, and if you are trying to match a book set with metal type you're in for a lot of manual work). Desired is usually set at 100 per cent (which means ID will strive to use the word spacing set in the font). I usually don't like seeing word spacing set below 90 per cent. Maximum is what you can live with. I always leave letterspacing set at 0 (I don't believe in it), but those who do use it will normally use a very tight range.
Mike Witherell:
No matter what Justification settings you setup in InDesign paragraph styles, InDesign will vary from it. My belief is to give it more parameters to work with, in order to get closer to what I want to see more often. I setup at least 2 if not all 3 settings to have a bit of leeway. For example:
Word Spacing: 80 / 100/ 120
Letter Spacing: -5 / 0 / 5
Glyph Scaling: 97% / 100% / 103%
If the OP wants looser spacing most of the time, he might try increasing the numbers, especially the desired, like this:
Word Spacing: 100 / 120 / 140
Letter Spacing: 5 / 10 / 15
I usually don't give an tracking values to the styles at all.
My apologies in advance to those who are horrified at the idea of glyph scaling.
There was another lengthy discussion on the pros and cons of glyph scaling...
Harbs