hi there,

Hugh from PressBooks here. We've got a University Press client, and have produced for them a PDF template output, from PressBooks/Prince.

They are generally happy with the output, but there is one deal-breaker: bottom-balancing is not good enough.

That is, the bottom of the body text on recto and verso should align, but often does not.

See:

and

and


There are two things that might help:
* we have not implemented hyphenation correctly
* we have widows/orphans set to 3 lines ... which is maybe too punishing?

Questions:
* are there any other Prince techniques to address this issue?
* is dynamic adjustment of line-spacing (to ensure consistent tops & bottoms) ... feasible? desirable? crazy?

I would suggest smaller widow/orphan to start with. This is forcing your current situation. If you want to interactively adjust the tracking of paragraphs I can help you with that. I work with Bibles (2 column) and must have column balance. Ask Mike to connect us if you want to know more.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators

We set widows and orphans to 1; spreads then generally align . But then we fix the actual widows/orphans by adjusting word/letterspacing in the paragraphs, and that's not an automated process, not to mention last pages of chapters with 1 line of text, etc.

Dave

@jim: we've enabled hyphenation & tested with widows=2 orphans=1 ... much better (though not perfect). Of course, there is a penalty. Would love to talk about your process.

@dave: thanks ...and what tool are you using to do the manual adjustments?

would like to chat with both of you if possible, I can be reached by email at:
hugh pressbooks com.