Need help with Formatting for avoiding rivers and ragged edges

English
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#1

ok, I’ve spoken with a professional formatter at a book converence who told me about rivers and other minor things that mark my book as not professionally done. She uses InDesign (which I hate) but told me how she fixes that problem. I’ve applied her instructions (below) as best I can but I’ve noticed that even fully justified it leaves the ends a little ragged but inconsistently, mostly where I’ll have a space marker hanging out too far away, pushing the word back just enough to notice. Is there a way to fix this? Which of the spacing instructions should I be playing with?

Hyphenation:
Only hyphenate words with a minimum of 7 letters.
Only Hyphenate after the first 4 letters and before the last 3.

Do NOT hyphenate
Capitalized words*
The last word or across columns or pages.

Character Spacing: For flexibility in spacing while using left-justify and the formulas above:
In all the examples the desired size is 100% this is for when you have to tweak a sentence or two.
Word Spacing: Minimum 80% Maximum 110%
Letter spacing: Minimum -2% Maximum 2%
Glyph Scaling: Minimum 98% Maximum 102%

  • oh, yeah, is there a way to do this? I didn’t see one. She uses GREP to do it but I do not know the LO method for the same
#2

You didn’t say what version of LibreOffice you are using but obviously fairly recent if you can set the word and letter spacing for paragraphs. The release notes have some pointers but the linked bug report or blog post might shed some light, see ReleaseNotes/26.8 - The Document Foundation Wiki and the 3 or 4 releases before. Maybe you are too cautious with the spacing settings, I recall versions prior to the availability of settings could have word spacings of 200% or more.

Available in 26.8

Normal spaces get hidden, other spaces like en space, em space, etc. might be regarded as characters.

Check your font features too, some fonts have hanging punctuation.

#3

There is a faulty habit in the US (is this your country?): generations of “teachers” still require double spaces at end of sentences after the punctuation. This “tradition” dates back to the mechanical typewriter era which by construction only offered fixed pitch characters. It has been obsoleted for decades but US academics have not noticed and still follow it.

This may be a contributing factor. So replace all your double spaces by single spaces.

You didn’t mention how your document is formatted, specifically how it is aligned where you need that. You must use style to achieve professional look (and versatility and ease in formatting tuning). Alignment with spaces is not reliable at all because spaces can be expanded or shrinked to account for justification, defeating all your empirical computations. Similarly, avoid multiple tabs: if you need multiple tabs, this means you’re relying on implicit evenly-spaced stops which are globally defined and not specific to the current paragraph style. In the same spirit , alinea (or first line indent) must not be done with a Tab; it should be configured in the paragraph style.

#4

Sorry: Version 26.2.4.2
Using Georgia, not using en or em spaces

#5

ok, yes, US. But even here we’ve phased that out. It was hard for me, as my hands memorized that double space after punctuation. (And yes, I learned on a manual, so I very much know why, and why qwerty is so slow compared to other layouts, but I’m too old and memory too unreliable to retrain a whole muscle memory layout) I am not using double spaces. (I’ve also been told that using them might get me flagged as AI, but I can’t think why it would have been taught to use them)

My document is fully justified, zero tabs. I handle that through first line indent of .30 using paragraph style. I’ve adjusted the character spacing as listed above, set my hyphenation to auto, 4 characters at line end, 3 at begin, 2 compound at line end (don’t know what that is so didn’t futz with it), and 7 minimum word length.

It does tighten up the gaps between words, but I am starting to see places where the space mark at the end of a line is stretched so I end up with a ragged edge.

I wish I could find the way to upload a sample…

#6

That’s weird because spaces at end are “ignored”, i.e. they are considered part of the margin. So if you could send an example with it, it would help. On second thought, have you a linebreak there? You can tell be enabling View → Formatting Marks. linebreaks are displayed as a down-then-left arrow while paragraph marks are mirrored Ps (a “pilcrow”). This kind of space stretching occurs in justified lines terminated by a linebreak unless you have configured some compatibility rule in Tools → Options.

From personal experimentation, don’t be dogmatist about it. It seems the feature is not yet bullet-proof production-quality. I had to try and fail until I found a satisfactory pragmatic setting.

#7

I figured out how to upload a sample page. Here’s the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vdrj67E_WfCHd2Ft6rK-n53z0YQ3X3Il/view?usp=sharing

Unfortunately, for me to be taken as a ‘professional’ doing my own formatting, I have to be pendantic about things. I don’t understand the settings enough to know what to twitch and what does what.
I’d hate to have to go line by line and manually adjust my rivers. THat’d add weeks onto an already prolonged prep schedule.

I appreciate any and all sincere help.

#8

I suspect that there might be some carry over from another word processor. In the Alignment tab, I set the Justification to the same settings as for Body Text paragraph style in a new document. I then selected all the text and clicked Format > Clear direct formatting and the text justified itself nicely.
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You have 8 Mb of images in your sample, no wonder you couldn’t upload it to this site
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The paragraph styles need some work. Instead of using the built-in styles which are nicely hierarchical with inheritance, you have created your own paragraph styles but without the order that the built-in styles have…

1 Like
#9

Facepalm I forgot there are page formats in the document for an image to be an area fill.
I did copy and paste the document from one form of the document to another for a ‘cleaner’ reformat. both LO

So I should change the format in the original doc before transfer? or should I re-re-apply the new formats?
I did reapply in the new doc, when I imported but it made no changes.

#10

In my view your document is formatted extremely complex and cumbersome. Example: The paragraphs are formatted as styles and additionally in direct format. So if you make changes in the styles (here: [basic paragraph]) there is no effect on the paragraphs. You had to take direct formatting away before (as @EarnestAl suggested).
IMO you should simply use paragraph style text body (or some style derived from it) for your “mass text” (German: Mengentext, no adequate English term found for this).

More: I found round about 50 page styles. In case that you need a full page background (e. g. page style CompMaA) I can agree with your proceeding. Unfortunately LibreOffice does not link but embed images for these purposes (in contradiction to OpenOffice). So you will get a partly pompous text file.

  • But for most “pure” text pages you should reduce and unify the page formats.

I am not sure but I think If I were you I would copy the entire text as unformatted into a new text file and then format only via (paragraph and character) styles. And by the way you could slim down the amount of page styles.


Godspeed


EDIT
Strictly recommended (before starting your work):
Designing with LibreOffice
Download in ODT or PDF format:
https://designingwithlibreoffice.com/?page_id=27

#11

I did some testing on your sample file. Others have already mentioned most points.

Though you have embedded Georgia font, I don’t think it is automatically used by Linux; I suspect it is still substituted.Not sure about a possible font issue, I tried to trigger different hyphenation points and line distribution. So I changed font size slightly. Curiously, as soon as I request a size larger then 13pt, LO crashes.

I manually forced Liberation Serif on the whole text, with a dramatic change in text layout, but font size change still causes crash above 13pt.

I copy-pasted text in fresh documents (standard paste and unformatted text paste) with the same result.

Next I looked at the XML encoding which revealed a very bad mixture of direct formatting. One case is manual change in several locations to Times New Roman. This was not visible probably because of font substitution on my machine. Another case is “professionalism fault”: you manually applied italics on character’s nickname. Italics can be used for purposes like emphasis, quotation, foreign expression, irony, … If you direct format them, you can’t manage them separately. You should apply a character style representative of the specific meaning (semantics). Built-in Emphasis is available for emphasis. You must create dedicated character styles for the other nuances.

As a general rule, “professional” documents should contains absolutely no direct formatting, at least as far as typography is concerned; direct format is acceptable though for text flow (e.g. exceptional page break). Format → Spotlight feature is the tool of choice to hunt for formatting tuning and direct formatting highlighting.

Character styles are frequently neglected because the notion does not exist in Word (from this point of view, Word is not a “professional” tool because it does not implement styles apart from paragraph, relying on direct formatting for the rest).

Regarding yur page styles, they are far too numerous. If the sole purpose of multiplying them is the need to have different headers and footers, this can be solved with fields in case the header echoes the current chapter heading. In this case, a single page style is enough for all chapters (perhaps two if you want a separate layout for the first page). But it requires applying Heading 1 to chapter heading (or an equivalent one if your created a custom style with the adequate outline properties). Anyway you seem to have messed up the usual dependency tree of built-in paragraph styles.

Even if you need full-page background for a single page (not for a consecutive sequence of pages), it is much better and more efficient to attach the image to some representative element in the page, e.g. a heading, sub-title, … because this does not need a specific page style and the trick can be used several times. When an image or frame is inserted, two of its properties are independent from each other:

  • its anchor, i.e. the text to which it is attached, and this will dictate in which page it appears
  • its location within the page: it is absolutely arbitrary and can be sent into the background

In addition, these properties can be recorded in a frame style and be reused. Like with other style categories, modifying the frame style will impact all occurrences, offering “centralised” formatting and layout tuning.

2 Likes
#12

yes I did. It was deliberate. He was called something else and corrected the person, putting the emphasis on his prefered nickname.

Yes, I have had problems in the past with the ‘different first page’ not applying correctly. I just had a novel that had named sections each with thier own mini chapters within, and I had to have the section name on the footers. I did not see another way to do this.

How do I clean it up? I have a very specific format/layout that I use for writing for the most part and I guess the file is just a collection of all past ‘styles’ created for the file in question. I’m trying to set up a template so I can just either import the old story or write directly from scratch, but obviously I’m failing. I just took the last document I liked the formatting of and stripped it of everything unnecessary but I didn’t think it would hold on to styles I was not using.

this has been an issue in the past. All my chapters must start on the right page, but I cannot stand a blank left page, so I put an area image in a ‘blank page’ style to allow for bleed and set positioning. Honestly, I’ve tried with just attaching it to something and that NEVER works out right. It starts shifting position during editing and… I found it to be easier to have a dedicated plate page.

I would, however, love to be able to mass edit my section dividers for consistency… (This book has a little skull and crossbones for when I shift time or place)

what I’m getting from this is that I need to open an new doc and change the basic styles to fit my needs?

#13

thanks. I really didn’t knwo that what I wasn’t using still came along for the ride. How exactly do I do that? Just open a new doc and change the existing styles to my needs? I had at one point had a ‘novel style’ and a ‘writing style’ for the difference in page size and needs, etc.


btw, how do you see all the styles that are attached? and where I’ve used direct formating? How do I see that?

#14

For that I know two ways (see attached screenshots):


Sure. Probably you have to create some new styles based on existing ones. But bear in mind that you have to create the ideas about styles etc. in your brain before you start.


Check the “bible for authors” Designing with LibreOffice (linked in my last comment). Examine the styles (paragraphs, characters, lists) in the odt version of that book.


EDIT
For deeper insights in typography and other basic thoughts read To Tame a Writer (To Tame a Writer | From Mind to Type).

1 Like
#15

THank you. This has been most helpful!

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