Friday, June 29, 2018
Too much text Try TypeFitter Pro
Too much text Try TypeFitter Pro
Id like to share a little bit about one of my favorite plugins. TypeFitter Pro was developed by Teacup Software and eventually purchased by Typefi Systems. According to the Typefitter manual:
TypeFitter also allows you to manually tighten and loosen text by �nudging� your justification and tracking settings up or down. TypeFitter will �nudge� a whole group of settings all at once, which is a big time saver. Because TypeFitter emphasizes changing justification settings like word spacing, letter spacing and glyph scaling, you can tighten or loosen your type without compromising high quality typography.At its simplest use, with just the click of a button, Typefitter will make slight adjustments to text, effectively fitting more text into a smaller amount of space. Its great for use on those text-heavy documents, where just one or two lines of text overflow onto the next page. Whats so magical about this is that TypeFitter does this without adjusting horizontally scaling the type! Out of curiosity, I went digging around in the paragraph panel to see how it did this. It makes micro adjustments to the Hyphenation and Justification settings.
Here is my document before I started adjusting it with TypeFitter Pro. There are just a couple of lines on the right-facing page, but I need those lines to be on the left-facing page (and I dont want to horizontally scale the text or adjust all the kerning). I needed to make a few adjustments to the second paragraph and the the fourth paragraph.
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| My default justification settings |
First I started by clicking the "Tighten Text" button.
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| Tighten Text button |
That gave me little visible results, but it did adjust the Justification settings like so:
So then I clicked on the Tighten Text More button...
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| Tighten Text More button |
... and I got these settings.
I still needed a little more tightening, so I clicked "Tighten Text More" a couple more times.
That was enough to get the extra text on the right page to fit onto the left page.
Whats so cool about Typefitter Pro is that you can save these tightened paragraph settings right into your paragraph style. You could have a few different styles, each with slightly different justification settings. You could name them something like:
- Body
- Body, Tighter
- Body Tighter x2
- Body, Tighter x3
The plugin has the ability to enforce all kinds of typefit rules. I use it at its most simple function. But if you need more control than just pressing the "Tighten Text" button a couple of times, check out the TypeFitter documentation (which is very good by the way). Its beautiful to look at and has great information.
TypeFitter Pro is one of my mainstay plugins, and if ever Im in a versions of InDesign where I doesnt have it installed, I miss it so much. It makes my life easier and helps in my type-fitting tasks while at the same time, lets me keep the nice-looking type that I work so hard on creating.
https://www.typefi.com/products-services/design-tools/typefitter/
