Avoid repeated line beginnings and endings in Paragraph Composer

In professional book typesetting, repeated beginnings or endings on consecutive lines can create distracting visual patterns. For example, several consecutive lines may begin with the same short word (“de”, “the”, “of”, etc.) or end with the same letters, syllables, words, or word endings.

There are third-party tools that can detect some of these repetitions after the text has already been composed, but correcting them manually is extremely time-consuming. Fixing one occurrence may also recompose the paragraph and create another repetition a few lines later.

InDesign already evaluates alternative line breaks, hyphenation and spacing when composing paragraphs. It would therefore be extremely useful if Adobe Paragraph Composer could also take repeated line beginnings and endings into account when choosing the best composition.

I am not suggesting that repeated endings or beginnings should be absolutely prohibited. Instead, they could be treated as an additional composition penalty: if two possible paragraph compositions are typographically acceptable, InDesign could prefer the one that avoids an obvious repetition.

Ideally, this could be configurable in Paragraph Style / Hyphenation or Justification options, for example:

— Avoid repeated line endings
— Avoid repeated line beginnings
— Minimum number of matching characters: 2 / 3 / 4 / whole word
— Number of consecutive lines to consider
— Adjustable priority or penalty

The feature should only alter the composition when an acceptable alternative exists within the paragraph's existing hyphenation and justification settings. It should not create poor spacing merely to avoid a repetition.

This would be particularly valuable for books, novels and other long-form editorial work. In documents containing hundreds of pages, manually finding and correcting these visual repetitions can require many hours of typesetting work.

InDesign's Paragraph Composer already considers the paragraph as a whole rather than composing every line independently. Adding repeated line beginnings and endings as another typographic factor in that calculation would make it an even more powerful tool for professional book composition.