Breaking a paragraph up, and aligning it
A paragraph broken into lines, set four ways: left, right, centred, justified.
Paragraphs, columns and typography
Hand over the words; it works out where each line ends, where each column stops and where each page breaks.
You give it a paragraph. It measures every word, decides where each line ends, and pours what is left onto the next line, the next column, the next page. Nobody counts characters and nobody guesses how much will fit.
It also settles the awkward cases a person would otherwise have to notice by hand: a word too long for its column, the places inside a word where it may be split, a pair of words that must not be parted across a line, a heading that has to shrink rather than run off the edge. Two entire novels are laid out this way, chapters and all.
What it saves you
- Text of unknown length still fits
- A description that runs to three lines on one order and eleven on the next needs no special case and no second look. The page absorbs it, and the rest of the document moves down politely.
- Nothing runs off the edge
- A word wider than the column it sits in is broken or shrunk to fit, where you said and how you said — never spilled silently over the margin where nobody notices until it is printed.
- It reads like a book, not like a printout
- Justified paragraphs, indents, tab stops that line figures up on the decimal point, dotted lines leading to a page number, lists that hang under their own bullet.
See it done
Every one of these is a real PDF this library wrote, with the source that wrote it.
Breaking an overlong word
A word too wide for its column: left whole, or cut to the edge.
Soft hyphens and no-break spaces
A justified column set twice: the long words breaking at their soft hyphens with a hyphen shown, or left whole, and a figure a no-break space keeps together.
Break points after a slash or a hyphen
A justified column set twice: file paths and compounds running past the edge with no break points, then wrapping where a break after a slash or a hyphen is allowed.
Text poured into columns
One long passage poured into three columns, each fitting the lines its height allows and handing the rest to the next.
Paragraph indents and spacing
The same two paragraphs six ways: the indents, the room around a paragraph, its last line, its first line.
A contents page with dot leaders
A contents page whose entries are led to their page numbers by dots the layout draws.
Changing style in the middle of a paragraph
A paragraph whose style changes inside it: size, underline, colour.
Tabulations and their stops
The same tabulated rows under each of the three methods, then a contents block whose dots run out to a stop on the right. A tabulation can step on from wherever the text stopped, land on the regular grid of a typewriter, or aim at a stop of its own, on which the text that follows starts, centres, or lines up by its decimal point.
Lists made from a hanging indent
Bulleted, numbered and nested lists, each built out of a hanging indent and one tab stop rather than out of list machinery: the marker sits in the room the indent opens, and every line below the first begins where the tabulation put the text.
Stamps fitted to a box
What a document says about itself — DRAFT, COPY, PAID — laid across boxes of four different shapes and scaled to each.
Shrunk headings and a turned label
Headings of different lengths shrunk to share one column, and a label turned a quarter turn up the page's spine.
A whole novel in English
A public-domain English novel read into its twelve chapters and laid out across sixty numbered pages, behind a contents you can click, each chapter opening a page of its own and the engine choosing every line break.
A whole novel in French
The same layout on a French text: thirty-seven chapters over a hundred and sixty-nine pages, drawing the accented alphabet, so the font kept inside the file carries every shape a wider alphabet needs.