Hello forum,
I am dealing with a pamphlet right now and I have been having a hard time with text styles namely to get the text to fit on a baseline grid. The grid is 12 points and so I have designed the styles so that all line spacing properties are multiples of 6, so that I can get in-between spacings between headings, and then just throw in a line with no text, styled with 6 points specified before and after paragraph as well as line height.
Now, this sounds good in theory, but in practice it is a lot harder. I found out after many trial and errors, that the character size also counts and overrides the line height which makes the whole thing of creating text styles a total guesswork.
For example, the main text is Sabon 10 pt with 12/12/12 (berore, after, line height). Now I want to add a paragraph heading with Myriad and I make it 10,5 bold, to make it stand out a bit, with the same line spacing. Now this will wreck the whole thing so that lines in different columns don't line up because the text will deviate from the baseline grid.
When I change text size of the paragraph heading to 9,5 pt it suddenly behaves and fits in. Now, that is good, but I don't think text styles should behave like that, they should respect the line height and if the text is too big, the letters on different lines should just overlap.
Now when the text size matters and overrides line height (at least in paragraph text) it makes the whole thing unnecessary complicated and difficult. I hope you can look into this Corel.
Maybe I'm not understand, but look at this...
Correct, you do not understand The problem arises when you try to add something more than just plain paragraph text. Read my entry again.
this..
Hi Sancho,
if I understand Lars correctly he is meaning what my following diagram shows. I placed some 12pt text with 12pt line spacing and paragraph spacing into a 2-cloumn paragraph text box. I took a screen capture. The text in column 1 aligns nicely with column 2, as confirmed by the grid lines. I then changed the first line of text in the first column to 16pt and saw that the text in the 2nd column remained aligned to the gridlines, but column 1 text had shifted and no longer aligned to the 2nd column. I took a screen capture of this and placed it below the first screen capture:
As an aside, how did you guys get your line spacing, and before & after paragraph spacing to show in points? Mine always shows in percentages and I cannot find a way to change it.
Best regards,Brian.
Well, you are getting closer Yes, I mean that the problem arises when you hae something else than plain paragraph text. The trick is to make headings work in the flow of the text without having the text jump off the grid.
So, therefore you must use multiples of the baseline grid line height for all measures, BUT even if you do so, you might find that it doesn't work. And that is because text size somehow overrides line height. So you must take text size into accound as well, and here it gets a bit tricky.
In my example with Sabon 10/12 there is no problem, BUT when you introduce another font like Myriad bold, it might happen that the letters are bigger in that font so they won't fit into the grid AND in that case, the letter size seems to override the specified line height. That's why I need to specify Myriad 9,5 pt instead of 10 or 10,5 pt, which I would have preferred.
Also you get no warnings of this, so you might go crazy as you try to find the culprit by trial and error. (But I remained almost sane )