In InDesign I often manipulate the number of lines in certain paragraphs in order to avoid widows or orphans, to get section headers on the right place, or other fine-tuning in the design. This can be done by changing the amount of space between words (if the text itself can't be changed).

This subject has been discussed before in this forum, and it seems that there is (as yet) no direct hook to influence the amount white space between words (in a left and right justified text).

One way around this would be to manipulate the hyphenation of long words around line breaks. This might force Prince to use more (or less) white space between words in the paragraph involved. This seems feasible in languages with many long words, like German, but less so in English.

Are there any other hooks or tricks to manipulate the number of lines of a particular paragraph?

Your help and ideas would be very much appreciated.

There is the word-spacing property, and we are also working on Prince for Books to deliver higher-quality hyphenation and paragraph breaking for publishing purposes.

Thanks!

We use small amounts of word-spacing to do this. In a pinch tiny amounts of letter-spacing may be required to fix a recalcitrant paragraph. Discretionary hyphens, zero-width spaces, and spans preventing hyphenation are also useful.