Paragraph Composer and Single Line Composer.. What´s difference?

[G***@adobeforums.com]

Hi,

My name is Gustavo Del Vechio and it´s my first time posting here. I´m studying InDesign and I´d like to know what´s the difference between Adobe Paragraph Composer and Adobe Single Line composer.

I´ve read application´s help but I haven´t understood anything.

Thank´s for any answer.

Regards.

[P***@adobeforums.com]

The single line composer is the traditional way layout programs have operated. As you set type, each line is examined for best fit and is broken where the rules determine, then the next line is composed. Once composed, a line is not revisited except if text before it is edited.

The paragraph composer is similar, but continues to look at all lines in the paragraph as you add, or edit following text, and will adjust line breaks early in the paragraph if a later change/addition would make a different break result in a more balanced look.

You can see the difference in action if you watch as you type the same same text into two identically sized frames, one with the paragraph composer, and the other the single line composer.

Peter

[j***@adobeforums.com]

A somewhat suprising result of the paragraph composer is that if you add some text, the paragraph may suddenly run a line shorter. Nasty if you inserted just a single comma ...

The technical reason is that the insertion made the spacing a little bit tighter on that line. The composer re-evaluates the paragraph, and decides to make all spaces in the entire paragraph a bit smaller. With full consideration of your hyphenation settings, preferred spacing, and what not ...

Actually, it's a fantastic feature. The amount of calculations is staggering -- read Knuth's "The TeX Book" chapter on how TeX uses (probably) the very same shortest-path algorithm to do it. You might even find the source code of his implementation on the 'web (usually in the form of a heavily commented PDF). It's in an arcane programming language, somewhere from the 70s, but it took the rest of the world 30 years to catch up!

[D***@adobeforums.com]

read Knuth's "The TeX Book" chapter on how TeX uses (probably) the very
same shortest-path algorithm to do it.




If you want to read more about ID's implementation of the paragraph composer, a link to the patent application was posted some while ago and the patent application can now probably be found easily enough with google.

[AlFerrari]

Actually, Indesign is protected by a whole raft of patents. Those interested can research that at this link:

<http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html>

[G***@adobeforums.com]

Thank´s a lot friend...

I´ve understood.

Great great

Thank´s