- Type Basics: The Character Palette
- Type Basics: The Paragraph Palette
- The Paragraph Palette Menu Commands
- Summary
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The Paragraph Palette Menu Commands
Several commands appear in the Paragraph palette's menu. Roman hanging punctuation is an advanced typesetting option. With paragraph type, certain punctuation marks fall outside the margins to the left and right, creating a "cleaner" look to the margins.
The Justification dialog box (see Figure 7) controls how Photoshop justifies paragraphs. Making changes here allows you to make tiny adjustments to how Photoshop spaces words and letters to create full justification.
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Figure 7 Generally speaking, the default justification settings should be retained.
- Word Spacing establishes minimum, maximum, and target amounts for space between words. One hundred percent represents the font's built-in spacing plus any changes you've made to tracking in the Character palette. Values can range from 0 to 133%.
- Letter Spacing determines how much change Photoshop can make to spaces between letters within words. Justifying relies on letter spacing only after word spacing has been applied and only if necessary. While percent is shown in the dialog box, the unit of measure is actually fractions of an em. Inputting 0% in all three fields turns off letter spacing.
- Glyph Scaling, a method of last resort, actually changes the width of individual characters to create justification. Sacrificing the appearance of the letters for the appearance of the margins is rarely a good idea. A value of 100% represents the original width of each character.
- At the bottom of the dialog box, you can specify what percentage of a font's size will be used for the Auto setting in the Leading pop-up menu of the Character palette.
The Hyphenation dialog box (see Figure 8), opened with the Hyphenation command of the Paragraph palette's menu, controls what rules Photoshop applies when breaking words at the end of a line. Photoshop uses the assigned dictionary to determine where a word will be hyphenated; these settings determine if a word will be hyphenated at all.
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Figure 8 Photoshop even provides control over which words will be hyphenated.
The Hyphenation Limit controls how many consecutive lines can end with hyphens. The Hyphenation Zone establishes a distance from the right margin in which a word will not be hyphenated. For example, if the preceding word enters the designated zone, the following word will be moved in its entirety to the following line. Likewise, if a word to be broken does not have a dictionary-defined break within the zone, the word remains unhyphenated.
If you uncheck the box at the bottom of the dialog box, words that begin with a capital letter cannot be hyphenated. This includes proper nouns, as well as words that start sentences. This setting has no effect on type set in all caps or entered with the CapsLock key locked down.
Generally speaking, the default values for both Hyphenation and Justification are great and, now that you know these two dialog boxes exist, you can forget about them completely!