Justification, while pleasing to the eye from the perspective of an entire page, creates problems. Hyphenation can correct this, to some degree, but it too has its problems. In the end, when justifying text, certain lines of text end up being scrunched while many others leave wide open spaces between words.

In doing my best to correct for these problems, I tend to make most use of the horizontal scale feature. I often find that most of these visual blemishes (scrunching or overly-wide word spacing) can be corrected by either reducing the horizontal scale down to about 97% (in the case of scrunching), or increasing it to (usually) 103 to 106%. In the worst cases, I have found a need to increase the horizontal scale to as much as 112% or more. When this is necessary, I have found that compensating by reducing the vertical scale to 97% often visually corrects for most of the weird look created in the letters by stretching them to 112% or more.

I would like to see a feature where InDesign could auto-correct for justification problems such as these. It would obviously need to analyze the spaces between each word. When the visually pleasing average spacing is ruined by justification, this justification auto-correct feature would employ similar changes as I have described, above.

This would of course require a new element introduced in the Paragraph Style Options window, possibly called "Justification Auto-Correct," with a similar on-off check box akin to the one on the Hyphenation tab, and with standards set of reducing scrunched lines by as much as 3% horizontal scale (to 97%) and a standard of up to (at least) 106% as a standard. As already noted, exceeding 108 or 109%, in my experience, tends to get to the point where the letters look stretched--too much. Thus, an option to allow for reducing the vertical scale (standard up to 97% perhaps) when the horizontal scale exceeds a certain amount would be prudent to include in this feature, as well.

I can spend HOURS manually correcting these justification problems. I would imagine that most people simply ignore them, because they are pesky, require you to read through the text carefully in order to spot them, and---when you make changes--require you to remove the manual correction you have made.