Message Body:
Hello, I am typesetting a 5.5 x 7.5 inch, 450 page book. It is a middle grade audience 11-12 pt font and 16 to 17 leading.
I have the following settings:
- Facing pages
- Keep options at 2 lines.
- No hyphens - which helps readability with young readers
- Text is aligned with gridlines.
- I am using this GREP to get rid of orphans, widows etc. <(\s?(\S+)){2}$
- Text frame options vertical justification is "top".
But this technique results in some pages having 1 or 2 blank lines at the bottom of the grid. When this happens on one facing page but not the other, the pages are not aligned at the bottom. If I allow a lot of hyphens, widows and orphans etc. this fixes the problem, however with young readers - not a good idea.
Although, I do notice that major publishers these days are often skipping this "widow orphan runt" step. Thus, their long, best-selling middle grade books have widows orphans runts all over the place. So maybe industry standards have loosened on this, and publishers don't care about it anymore. Even so, for young readers, it's awkward.
Is there either a GREP or a script that will look for blank lines at the bottom of a grid and adjust the chapter text to fill all the lines on the page without sacrificing readability and acceptable spacing? Otherwise, this becomes a laborious process to manually fix pages one by one. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!