InDesign Script: Show Me the Rivers
November 06, 2024 | Extras | en | fr
My colleague Mikhail Ivanyushin has just developed a nice utility that detects and highlights text ‘rivers’, these stacks of oblique or vertical spaces which form randomly within a typographic composition and “make it ugly.” Chasing such road accidents is a fetish sport. So if you don't have time to damage your eyes, here's a more comfortable solution…
“The problem is that the layout designer does not see these rivers, because he does not read what he is making up. The rivers are seen by editors and readers.” Mikhail's main script is based on a ScriptUI palette available in English, Russian, Spanish, and French. It provides various settings for fine-tuning text river detection and operates with respect to the cursor position in your InDesign document.
Note. — Remember to re(position) the cursor in the area to be explored before starting the process. Also make sure that the target frames do not have overset text.
The utilities designed by Mikhail Ivanyushin go beyond highlighting rivers. The full product package also delivers a SetSpaceKerning script that will help you improve text justification and get rid of spacing issues. “The idea is to leave the tracking of the text unchanged, and increase or decrease the width of the usual spaces by changing their kerning” (feature that is not directly available to InDesign users.)
Originally written in Russian, the documentation is available in English and Spanish.
Going further:
→ Overview: “Rivers in the text”
→ Demo version (ZIP)
→ User's Guides (ZIP,PDF)
