: Indesign cs5 gap in text I have text in 2 columns in a text box. There are large gaps inbetween some of the words in one area of a column. There is one space before and after each word.

@BetL875

The mostly likely reason is that your paragraph style (or the paragraphs with the problem) have Justify turned on and Hyphenation turned off. It's usually not a good idea to justify text when the width of the column is small relative to the size of the text. A good rule of thumb, if you don't want too many hyphens, is 55-60 characters per line. Sometimes you can get away with less, but most typesetters err on the conservative side.

Why the gaps? By default, InDesign adjusts only word spaces to justify text (in common with most other programs), but it has options that can help get rid of the uglies. Here is the dialog (Ctl-Alt-Shift-J/Cmd-Opt-Shift-J is the shortcut). I'm using InDesign CC, but the options haven't changed since at least InDesign 2.0:



And here is some text set in a narrow column (30-35 characters) with that default:



Ugly, indeed. I don't know any text designers who like the defaults under any circumstances, but the problems are pretty obvious here.

My own preference is to reduce the allowable word gap and allow InDesign to adjust letter spacing. (If you're using a serif font, glyph scaling can also help, but use cautiously and avoid using it with a sans.) My preferred settings for Minion in this kind of situation are usually in this range:



And here is what that same text looks like now:



The difference is obvious. With any given passage of text, you might need slightly different settings, and in some cases the word breaks are so bad that InDesign has no choice but to stretch things beyond your limits. You can have InDesign highlight these by turning on "H&J Violations" in the Composition settings in Preferences.

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