Paragraph Lengthen and Shorten
If you’re tired of messing around with tracking percentages and other settings whenever you need to make a paragraph longer or shorter by a single line, this pair of scripts is for you!
Paragraph Lengthen and Shorten are two InDesign scripts that solve one simple problem: They make a paragraph of text shorter, or longer, by one line, with a single click.
Think how much time that would save you!
Trying to balance a pair of pages in a book, but you’re short (or long) one line?
Is the copy for some advert one line too long or short?
Paragraph Shorten and Length fixes it (if at all possible) in a trice!
How Does It Work?
Paragraph Shorten and Lengthen works by changing the paragraph’s justification settings. It almost instantly homes in on the minimum adjustment needed to the “word spacing” values to add or remove a line.
Doing it this way (rather than using tracking or kerning) has many advantages, but the main one is that it allows InDesign’s fantastic “paragraph composer” to keep control of the word spacing, and gives it the flexibility it needs to find the optimal spacing for the words in the paragraph without forcing it to use ugly kerning or tracking values. All the script tells InDesign is what the new “minimum” and “desired” word spacing values are (the values we need to add or remove a line). InDesign can then use those values in the best possible way.
And all this happens without you needing to try a bit of this, and adjust a bit of that. One click and it’s done!