Help! InDesign text flowing in irregularly...

[eyeon]

I have an issue that is driving me crazy... in InDesign CS3, I am placing text and justifying it left, and many times (but apparently not always), it fills it into the columns with very irregular right side margins. This results in paragraphs looking way too narrow in some spots and just fine in others.

The thing that really gets me is that, looking at some of the lines that seem too short, InDesign is hyphenating and cutting words off at the end of a line way earlier than it needs to...

I've attached a screen grab to better illustrate what I'm talking about.

Anyone have any ideas? This is not only visually annoying but in situations where editors are having to actually cut stories shorter in order to allow for this oddity is unacceptable.

Please, any insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[shecky]

that is weird. it almost looks like you have remaining formatting hyphenation, etc. from the doc you are placing text from. you may want to remove all the formatting from the original doc and try it that way just to see if thats the issue.

also make sure you use adobe line composer instead of adobe paragraph composer setting on the flyout in your paragraph palette. i find i get much, much better control of rags that way.

 

[macstudent]

You may have to play with your hyphenation and justification settings.
Go to the panel menu on the paragraph panel and enable hyphenation and try tweaking the settings until you get the desired effect.

 

[tobefirst ⚽️]

It looks like you have "Balance Ragged Lines" checked to me. This preference is in the options on the paragraph palette, at least it is in CS2.