Balance Columns With Vertical Justification

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InDesign How-to: Balance Columns with Vertical Justification

The conundrum: You need to align type to a baseline grid but you don't want any widows or orphans. Making uneven columns of typeline up in InDesign is the job of vertical justification. Here’s how to make it work for you.

Written by James Felici on February 27, 2012

Categories: Fonts, Print, Print Design & Layout, Typography, How-Tos

It’s not unusual for a layout to specify that all pages should start and end on common baselines. It’s

standard practice in books and most magazines. InDesign’s not perfect at it, but using the following

techniques you can do a pretty good job of it.

The main problem with evenly filling columns of text are those little devils known as widows and

orphans, fragments of paragraphs that appear at the tops or bottoms of columns. The eye likes to see

a column of text as a tidy rectangle, so having the first line of an indented paragraph at the end of a

column looks bad; it appears as though a chunk of the text has fallen away. Likewise, the last line or

two of a paragraph at the top of a column also disrupts the harmonious geometry of the page. A

subhead as the last or penultimate line in a column is distracting and unattractive as well.

The trick to getting around these problems is combining InDesign’s Keep Options with its Vertical

Justification settings. Just as text justification spreads the spaces between characters and words to fill

a line of type from margin to margin, vertical justification spreads the spaces between lines of type to

fill a text frame from top to bottom. While you can use vertical justification to solve specific

problems on individual pages, it’s easier — especially in long documents — to use it to head off

problems before they arise.

Keep Options are found in the Paragraph panel menu, as shown in Figure 1. You use them to control

how many lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph must stay together as a unit and not be divided between columns or

pages. You can also use Keep Options to glue selected lines of type (think subhead) to a specified number of lines of text before

or after them.

Figure 1: In the upper part of the Keep Options dialog, you can specify that the selected paragraph be bound to any number of lines in the following paragraph. It’s good for gluing subheads to the text that follows them. In the lower part of the dialog box,

you define how many lines at the beginning or end of the selected paragraph should be held indivisible at the beginning or end

of a column.

The problem with Keep controls is that they oblige InDesign to set certain columns short of the bottom of the frame, because

lines that must be kept together can only be shoved into the next frame or column.

This is where InDesign’s Vertical Justification controls enter the picture. Using them, you can force the program to stretch the

leading in a short-setting column in order to fill the frame to the bottom. (You can’t squeeze the leading, only stretch it.) To find

these controls, shown in Figure 2, head for the Text Frame Options in the Object menu and click on the General tab.

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Figure 2: Choosing Justify from InDesign’s vertical justification Align pop-up causes the program to evenly stretch the leading

among all the lines a frame. How many text lines are in the frame is determined by settings in the Keep Options. By changing the

value in the Paragraph Spacing Limit field you can cause this justification to accomplished solely by feathering the leading between paragraphs.

Figures 3 through 5 show the whole process in action in a sample 3-column journal layout. First, in the Keep Options dialog, I

told InDesign that I wanted no fewer than 3 lines of a paragraph to appear at the top or bottom of a column. I used the same

restrictions for the subheads, by adding the proviso that they should stick with at least two lines of the paragraph that follows

them. To automate things, I included all of this in their respective paragraph styles. The result, seen in Figure 3, is two columns

that are set short to prevent orphaned lines or subheads appearing at their bottoms.

Figure 3: As shown here, using Keep controls avoids widows, orphans, and awkwardly placed subheads but only the expense of

creating a “ragged bottom” layout, where text columns vary in length. Click on image for larger view.

Figure 4 shows the result of turning on Vertical Justification. This can be done in advance on your master pages by making it anattribute of all your text frames. But in this case I simply clicked in the text with the text cursor, typed Ctrl-A/Cmd-A to select

all the text, and opened the Text Frame Options dialog box to make my settings.

You don’t have many options here. Under Vertical Justification, select Justify from the Align: pop-up menu. If given the chance,

InDesign will try to vertically justify a column of type by expanding only the spaces between paragraphs. This is rarely useful,

unless you’re setting listings, classified ads, or some kind of directory. You can specify a maximum value for the expansion in

the Paragraph Spacing Limit field. In our sample page, I left this value at zero, obliging InDesign to fill the column by increasing

the leading uniformly between all the lines.


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Figure 4: Turning on Vertical Justification cured the short columns, but created some new problems. The first column on the

recto page is clearly more loosely spaced than those on the verso, and the leading in the last column is out of control. Click on

image for larger view.

To fix the slack leading in the first right-hand page column, I slightly tightened the tracking of the first long paragraph in the

second column of the verso page, shortening it by a line and causing the entire spread to recompose. This drew lines from the

last column into the previous one, so its overall leading feel was a better match.

The last column, though, remained a problem. The two available solutions depend on your layout preferences. One is to let thelast column set short, with its normal leading; the other is to divide the text evenly over all three columns on the last page.

Which tack is easier depends on how the page was set up.

If the page was created with a single text frame and divided into three columns in the New Document or Margins and Columns

dialog box, you can’t have one column vertically justified and the other(s) not — vertical justification is a frame-wide

specification. If each column has been set up as a separate text frame, it’s a different story.

In the latter case, the easiest solution is just to select the last column’s frame and turn off vertical justification. The text will set

short using its specified leading.

If the text columns are all part of the same text frame, you could recreate it as three independent columns, re-pour the text, and proceed as above. But the simpler solution is to select the whole frame and choose Align: Top as a Vertical Justification option,

and then select Balance Columns at the top of the same dialog box. The text will then be divided evenly among all the columns

on the page and set at its specified leading.

But unless by chance the number of lines of text on the page divides evenly by the number of columns, you’ll end up with final

column that’s a line or two short. (Our sample layout failed this dumb-luck test, with the last column setting a line short.) This

may not bother you. But if it does, simply shorten the entire text frame so it ends just at the bottom of the longer (or longest)

column, and then select Align: Justify in the Text Frame Options dialog. As shown in Figure 5, this will cause all columns to

vertically justify and end on the same baseline.

Figure 5: Simply balancing the columns of text in this single text frame or the recto page didn’t create columns of equal depth,

but shortening the frame and vertically justifying the text did the trick. Click on image for larger view.

It’s important to keep in mind that when vertically justifying text, InDesign continues to follow your instructions for how the

first baseline in each frame should be positioned (as specified in the Object/Text Frame Options/Baseline Options dialog box).


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In addition, if you’ve specified that your text aligns to a baseline grid, InDesign will grid-align only the first and last lines in

each frame, with the others having their leading feathered as necessary.

Good Vertical Justification controls are a key to successful batch pagination: automated, rules-based page layout. InDesign isn’t

fully up to it yet, but it’s getting there. The day of push-button pages might not be far away.

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