![]() Illustrator also has the line compositing engine that indesign uses, so i you have access to that, you could test it in illustrator. Indesign or a pro-level layout package (or TeX) do have much better compositing engines. Mellel is also rock solid and fast – also with long documents, which will come in handy when working on a novel. If you don't want to go for more "esoteric" solutions like the two mentioned, Mellel will certainly give you a better looking document than Word. But even with automated tools you'll always have cases where you have to make adjustments by hand since you'll always have words which don't get hyphenated correctly etc. But if we leave that aside, InDesign and LaTeX (in combination with the microtype package) produce the best automated justified text, since they both offer microtypographic goodies like character protrusion which really make a difference for justified text and AFAIK use the same algorithms (IIUC, Quark also offers protrusion with version 8). There are many people working in layout who will tell you that no automated solution will ever result in a really beautiful document. ![]() Seriously, besides all its other shortcomings, Word documents just don't look very nice. Second, if you care for a nice page layout, forget Word. A Garamond variant is much better for this (Stempel Garamond being the most beautiful one IMO) there are, of course, many others fonts suited for this, but Times in general is not good for novels. ![]() Perhaps the other more advanced hyphenation algorithms do a "better" job? I think that publishers may be doing a combination of justification format (Adding a few extra spaces throughout the line to push it perfectly to both margins) plus hyphenation but that's just a suspicion.įirst, Times is a font which was originally designed for newspaper layout (guess for which newspaper) in other words: it's a narrow font for column layout and not for pagewide layout. Anyone know the size and type of font that real publishers use? Perhaps it was my font choice? I tried Times New Roman in 12. I tried playing with the hyphenation zone size and still no good. With word, it appears to be hyphenating a lot more than a real published book, and also doesn't look good. When I go to the bookstore and look at novels, everything looks perfectly justified. I did quickly try Word's built in hyphenation feature and it looks like crap. I havn't had a chance to try the other solutions yet - but I definitely will this weekend when I have time.
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