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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

How do I justify text & turn off hyphenation in InDesign?

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at Justification, and Hyphenation. At the moment, we have the text from the previous video and we want to go from this, and then justify it like this. Nice. And then we're going to go through and turn the hyphenations off, which are these little hyphens here, so let's go and do that now. And hyphenation's off. So let's go and learn how to do that.

Let's start with justification. Easy enough one, so I'm going to grab my 'Text Box', I'm going to grab my 'Type Tool'. Now what we want to do is, make sure all of the text is selected. What's actually happening is-- can you see this red box down the bottom here? It means that there's not enough room for my 'Type' to fit. So we're going to have to-- we're going to lower the font size a little bit later anyway, so we're not too worried about it now, but I need to select all of the text. You can click in here, anywhere, and go to 'Edit', 'Select All'. That will select the text, even the stuff you can't see, because if you just do the stuff you see, it will only change that and there'll be stuff hanging off the edge here that won't be justified. Or, what I end up doing is, it's a bit weird but if you double click, you get the word, you go to three clicks, you get the line, go to four clicks, you get the paragraph, and if you hit five you get the whole thing, including the stuff around the outside. Seems not that quick, I know. There's other ways, like 'Control A' on a PC, or 'Command A' on a Mac, any which way you like to select them. I don't know why, I use this right click. I use it all the time. It's especially good when you want to click just a paragraph, or just a line.

So I've got everything selected, and I want to go up the top here, from 'Character' to 'Paragraph'. And you see, along the top here we've used 'Left Align', 'Right Align', and 'Center'. We're going to use this one here, it says 'Justify Left'. And it just means that everything is going to align up and be forced to the edges. I don't really like justification because I find justification looks better visually, because that's a nice thing, everything aligns up so cutely, but in terms of reading, there can be some really big, these things here, called rivers where you end up with kind of these gaps flowing through things, where rivers are running through big white holes, you can see a big one there. And it's also that we can make it look buttered up next to each other, but when you're actually reading it, there's some really big justification gaps. And I guess that's the trade-off, whether you want it to look nice and then, the little boxes, or whether you want the actual lines to read nicely.

I don't really like justification, but to be honest, whenever I'm reading something I never pick it up, and go, "Oh, justified, I can't read this." So in terms of the user experience, let's not worry about it too much. If I find some of your work, and it's justified, I promise to only lecture you behind your back.

So, what we're going to do is look at hyphenation now, because justification and hyphenation often work together. And it's hyphenation, the little hyphens here, and justification forces it a little bit more-- or makes it a little bit more obvious. So I'm going to turn it off. But when I turn hyphenation off-- so I've selected it all, and we're going to go up to there, so I'm on 'Paragraph', 'Hyphenation'. Click. The only trouble with hyphenation is that it gets rid of all the little hanging bits, but we've got more gaps between them, so you got to decide.

If you like justification, how much do you need hyphenation? And in terms of hyphenation it's on by default, so every time I draw a new 'Type Box', and I start, say let's add some 'Place over the Text'. You'll see that hyphenation is on by default. It normally is. So what you can do, if it keeps coming on by default, let's have nothing selected, so absolutely nothing in your document, then go to 'Type Tool', go to 'Paragraph', and if you turn it on or off here, it will be set as the default for this document. I'm going to have mine set off. So there's no more hyphenations every time I draw a 'Type Box'. So in my case, I'm going to leave it justified, and I am going to make sure hyphenation is on just because it's breaking into, I'm just-- I can't hack all these big white spaces here. So that's my balance. Delete him.

That my friends, is justification and hyphenation. Let's save the document, and move on to the next video.