Hi

I have a query. Thirteen magazine now asks for all submissions in justified text. While I know how to do this on Word, a lot of my stuff just seems ridiculously stretched, so that:

He knew it was over.
He knew.

Becomes:

H e k n e w i t w a s o v e r.
H e k n e w.

Etc. It's a real pain and doesn't seem right to me. If you don't type every line more or less equally, and dare to be even the slightest bit eperimental, you turn your work into a dot to dot puzzle.

Any tips?

JB

I have been told that if you put an extra space at the end of each line, the over stretching will not be as bad but as I haven't tried it , I don't know!

Jane

JD - some thoughts, from my days of producing very dull leaflets selling very dull books to very - ah, not dull - academics. Apologies if you know all this already.

Since lines are naturally different lengths, to make the line endings level, the programme has to add or subtract space between the words. If there are few words per line - either because the column is narrow or the words are long - then on some lines the spaces will be huge. When the columns are narrow and so lots have big spaces, the eye joins these spaces up, and reads them as 'rivers' of white up and down the page. This is a typesetter's no-no. To avoid this, the programme has to gain or lose space between letters within words as well, and that's where the stretching happens. If you look, some lines are very squashed up instead, but that doesn't make them so unreadable, just ugly.

With narrow newspaper/magazine columns even pro typesetters can't always avoid it, and DTP programmes are much less skilled. If it's the magazine's fault, I suppose there's not much you can do. But if it's your work, it might be worth trying things like:

- wider column/s, narrower margins, smaller point size or all three - basically, more words per line

- use a proportional typeface - anything except Courier, basically - as the extra space between letters might be less noticeable

- use a serif typeface - Times, Garamond, Bookman - instead of a sans serif - Century Gothic, Ariel, Helvetica - as the serif's whole purpose is to lead the eye onto the next letter

- allow hyphenation - a last resort, I know, but I think you can overrule Word's sometimes rather peculiar ideas about where to break the word though don't ask me how.

Hope some of this rubbish helps

Emma

Thank you both for the advice.

I really have a version to justified text, even in a published book. I think the scruffy endings of a paragraph look far more appealing, but that's just me.

Anyway, I've not heard back from Thirteen Magazine anyway. Oh well.

JB