In Adobe InDesign, one chooses to set type using the Single-line Composer or the Paragraph Composer. The latter analyzes the entire paragraph and tweaks spacing

In Adobe InDesign, one chooses to set type using the Single-line Composer or the Paragraph Composer. The latter analyzes the entire paragraph and tweaks spacing and hyphenation to minimize rivers, ragged lines, orphans and widows. So nowadays, I don't manually check each page for rivers anymore. When designing the page layout, I decide on the 'color' (the density of the paragraph) that works best, so that rivers are avoided, but I leave it at that. I understand how river detection can be a fun mathematical puzzle, but it's moot. Adobe built the Multi-line Composer into InDesign since version 1.0 (1999). And in my experience, with every version, it gets better. From MacWorld's review of InDesign 1.0: "InDesign's text features will appeal to designers and production people tired of the drudgery of manual copyfitting and kerning. The Multi-line Composer feature can calculate hyphenation and justification settings by examining an entire paragraph (or as many lines as you specify), instead of just a single line, to create better-looking text. In the process, it notably reduces the amount of manual tweaking necessary and will be especially helpful if you're trying to avoid multiple word breaks in a design with awkward text wraps. Similarly, the program's Optical Kerning feature does its best to find optimal character spacing, even if you've mixed different type sizes and faces. " http://www.macworld.com/article/1014955/k2.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1014955/k2.html http://blog.paragonpress.net/2010/08/04/adobe-indesigns-paragraph-composer/ http://blog.paragonpress.net/2010/08/04/adobe-indesigns-para...