Jul. 30, 2009
Community service announcement! Think twice before hitting Enter twice…
I continually see people (newbies and other) adding space after a paragraph by hitting Enter twice on their keyboard (cringe). Please don’t. If you need to add space after a paragraph, take advantage of the wonderful typographic control InDesign provides. The best way to control the space after a paragraph is to use the “Space After” field within the paragraph panel/control panel. Doing this allows you to edit spacing easily.
For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.
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3 Responses to “Adding space after paragraphs”
There are a few common cases where space after is useful. But in most cases, production goes much more smoothly if space before is used instead.
By David on Jul 31, 2009
Each to their own. As long as there’s no hard returns, I’m cool with that.
By Neil Oliver on Jul 31, 2009
I’m inclined to agree with David. I’ve found in general that when ADs make their own dox, they like to “push down” with a space after, but the end result is often quite a few more special cases where the actual Space Before would have worked better. I’m not into flame wars, so not to worry, but i always ask my people to use Space before as the first part of the Paragraph Style and then, if there’s no other way to do it with space before, to add space after for special cases. You can set up an entire outline this way with how it’s formatted for people to get the idea.
I am guessing that maybe David used to “Spec Type” prior to the use of the Mac in publishing. That’s generally the way it was done. We rarely if ever used anything called +2, +6 pt to achieve 7/8 or simply and extra 8 pts between ¶s… IMHO, of course.
By Gary Barnett on Aug 3, 2009