InDesign How-To: Mind the Gaps
This article is excerpted from the February/March 2007 (#16) issue of InDesign Magazine. Buy this issue or subscribe to InDesign Magazine.
You’ve surely seen a page of justified text with big gaps between words. Instead of reading across, your eyes drift downward, following the cascading sequence of gaps. It’s the dreaded phenomenon known as “rivers of white space.” Then you glance across the page and your eyes flit between several dark patches where words are uncomfortably crunched together. Maybe you don’t have these problems because you set your body copy flush-left. Yet you still may be plagued with short lines sprinkled throughout, or gutters that look twice what they’re spec’ed. Achieving an overall consistent spacing in your body copy is important — without it, readers will be distracted by uneven light and dark patterns, and you’re likely to lose your audience. In this article, you’ll learn how to fix these problems. Be sure to go to the last page of the PDF for a special discount on an InDesign Magazine subscription. 
To read the article as a PDF file in your Web browser, click “Mind the Gaps.” You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing. To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader. We highly recommend Adobe Reader 7.0 and above to view this PDF. To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
This article was last modified on June 17, 2023
This article was first published on June 8, 2007
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