Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

How to Fix Line Breaks

Sometimes the easiest and best way to fix bad line breaks, especially if they involve long words that are hard to manage, is to have editing privileges: change a long word to a short word, or a short word to a long one; rephrase the sentence; eliminate superfluous words. But since that is not always possible, here are a few other tricks for adjusting the ends of your lines:

• Most software packages that work with text have a line break feature, sometimes called a “soft return.” Instead of hitting the Return or Enter key, you hit Shift Return/Enter or perhaps Option Return or Alt Enter. This creates a hard line break, but it does not pick up any of the paragraph formatting you would get with a Return, such as extra space ...