You’re working on the back cover of a brochure, setting up the legal copy at the bottom of the page. The client wants the legal all in one line across the page from margin to margin. The copy contains a copyright part, a registered trademark part and a code number. Each of these parts has to have an equal amount of space between the three groupings of words with the copyright flush left, the code number flush right and the registered trademark information centered in the remaining space. You could use Tabs but there is a faster, smarter way. Why smarter? If you use Tabs, Murphy’s Law is sure to come into play. You will need to make a change and have to adjust your Tabs.
So try the following instead. Select the legal copy and change the Alignment in the Paragraph palette to Justify All Lines. This will space out all the words equally from margin to margin. Next, select the space between the first and second parts of the legal copy and change it to a Flush Space (Type > Insert White Space > Flush Space). Justification will ignore all the “normal” spaces in the rest of the line, putting all “extra” space where the Flush Space was inserted. Add another Flush space between the second and third parts of your legal. This breaks up the legal copy into three parts with an equal amount of space between each part. The best part is, if you change the copy or the width of the Text Frame, the spacing between the parts of the copy will adjust automatically, always leaving an equal amount of space between the groups of words.
Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider.
Author: jeff witchel
Jeff Witchel graduated from Pratt Institute in 1973 with a B.F.A. (Cum Laude) in Advertising Design and Visual Communications. He has been an award-winning advertising art director, writer, designer, illustrator, and TV producer ever since.
Before starting his own advertising agency in New Jersey, Jeff built his career at top New York ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam, Grey Advertising, and Wells, Rich, Greene. Over the years, he has created award-winning work for many clients including AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Jell-O Pudding, The Plaza Hotel, and Pfizer. His many prestigious awards include N.Y. Art Directors Club Gold Award, One Show Gold Award, N.J. Art Directors Club Award, multiple Andy Awards, Graphis Annual, numerous readership awards, plus an Emmy Award nomination.
Jeff is a self-taught computer artist with over 19 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became the “go to” guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics.
As an Adobe Certified Expert, he’s provided online support for Adobe and is now an Adobe Certified Training Provider for both Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Adobe InDesign CS2. Jeff is one of just a handful of Adobe Certified Instructors in the New York metropolitan area. He also is a Quark Certified Expert in QuarkXPress 6 as well as a master of Adobe Photoshop and related applications. He counts among his training clients ad agencies, design studios, magazines, illustrators, and photographers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
