Hi all!

In InDesign (and other typesetting apps) I can adjust some settings regarding how the engine renders a paragraph. I attached a screenshot, where you can see those settings ("Hyphenation & Justification" settings).

You can define the optimal word spacing ("Wortabstand"), a range, in which automatic letter-spacing will be applied ("Zeichenabstand"), and a range, in which the glyphs will be distorted (`scaleX()` in CSS) on a per line basis.

This Youtube video shows and explains in detail, what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJoACD9qUeI&t=203s

Is this possible in PrinceXML? Or do you plan to make something like this possible?

Thanks,
Tobias

1. Bildschirmfoto 2026-07-09 um 15.43.05.png‎ 370.6 kB

Prince does not have min/max settings for hyphenation & justification equivalent to InDesign. Prince for Books might adjust letter-spacing during justification, but only by a small amount. Glyph scaling is not supported at this time.

An example of where letter-spacing adjustment might be necessary is in this Wind in the Willows sample:

https://www.princexml.com/samples/wind-in-willows/b-format.pdf

(Search for "cold chicken" and see the line that follows with very few word spaces available for justification).

I am curious how you would normally go about applying these settings, for example would you adjust them on a paragraph by paragraph basis in response to bad break choices, or apply them consistently across the entire text? It would help to understand the desired outcomes in order for us to design suitable mechanisms to achieve them.

Mike, thanks for the example you showed me.



These min/max settings are basic settings on a paragraph basis in InDesign. You define them at the very beginning of a new project taking all typographic settings (font familiy, font size, letter spacng, leading, etc.) of all of your basic paragraph styles (body, headlines, box texts, etc.) into account. The goal here is to get the most visually cohesive look of your type area / type setting.

If you have a style called “body,” you could also implement a “body tight” style to further compress a specific paragraph and thus avoid widows or orhpans. Those styles you would use, when you try to optimize the type setting by checking optically all pages of your project.

As I mentioned the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJoACD9qUeI&t=203s shows the process of fiddeling out the right adjustments and goals in detail.

Do you need further explanations? Feel free to ask for more details!