Working with the Paragraph Palette in Photoshop

You can use the Paragraph palette to format any or all paragraphs in a type layer. Simply select the paragraph or paragraphs that you want to format by clicking in an individual paragraph. You can drag a selection to select multiple paragraphs; or click a type layer containing the paragraphs to format all of them at once. The Paragraph palette’s pop-up menu gives you access to Justification and Hyphenation dialog boxes. You can use these to customize the default settings Photoshop uses for these functions. As a side note, if you’re not familiar with the word glyph used in the Justification dialog box, it is another word for font character.

Changing paragraph alignment
At the top of the Paragraph palette, you see a set of seven alignment buttons. Three align nonjustified text. They include the following:
- Left align text: All text is even with the left margin and allowed to be ragged on the right side of the column.
- Center text: Text is evenly centered in its column and ragged on both right and left edges.
- Right align text: All text is even with the right margin and allowed to be ragged on the left side. With vertical type, these choices align the text to the top, a center axis, and the bottom of a column.
Changing paragraph justification
The other four options in the Paragraph palette produce justified text, in which Photoshop inserts spaces between characters as necessary so each line is flush on both left and right sides. The options apply only to the last line of text in each paragraph. You can choose to make this last line flush left, flush right, centered, or force justified on both sides with spaces inserted by Photoshop. This last option sometimes calls for some manual tweaking to avoid a final line that is squeezed or expanded too much. Note that you can apply justification options to paragraph type only, not point type. With vertical type, the justification choices are top aligns, center aligns, bottom aligns, or force justifies the last line of text.
Changing paragraph indentation
The next three options in the Paragraph palette let you enter an amount of indentation between the sides of the text bounding box and the actual text. You can specify the amount of indentation from the left, right, and for the first line of the paragraph (creating a first line that is indented more than the others in the paragraph). For vertical type, the indentations are rotated 90 degrees.
Changing spacing between paragraphs
The next two options in the Paragraph palette let you specify the amount of space between paragraphs. You can specify the amount of space before every paragraph, the amount after every paragraph, or both.
Breaking long words across two lines
The final option in the Paragraph palette is the Hyphenate check box, which specifies whether Photoshop hyphenates words that are too long to fit on a line or leaves them intact. Turning on hyphenation can prevent awkward spacing, particularly with justified text that would otherwise contain a lot more spaces between characters to make a line fit. There are a few additional options that are found only on the Paragraph palette’s pop-up menu:
- Roman Hanging Punctuation: Controls whether punctuation marks (quotations, dashes, colons and so on) appear inside or outside the margins. Select this option to have the punctuation marks appear outside.
- Adobe Single-line Composer: Composition includes using a host of parameters, such as word and letter spacing and hyphenation to determine where a line should break. This option composes type one line at a time and offers more manual control over where lines break. The option favors compressing or expanding word spacing over hyphenation, but prefers hyphenation over compressing or expanding letter spacing. This is the default setting.
- Adobe Every-line Composer: Looks at multiple, possible breaking points for a range of lines. The option can optimize earlier lines in the paragraph to avoid weird breaks later on in the paragraph. Emphasis is given to even spacing of letters and words over hyphenation. This option can provide more even spacing and fewer hyphens.
- Reset Paragraph: Resets all the paragraph attributes back to the Photoshop default.

Editing Text
You can apply all the options described in this chapter as you enter text, or later, when you’re rearranging words or fixing typos and other errors. To make changes to the text itself, just follow these steps:
1. Open a saved image or create a new Photoshop document.
2. Select the Type tool.
3. Select the type layer you want to modify, or click in the type in the document.
4. You can begin typing at the place you clicked, backspace to eliminate characters, or drag the mouse from the insertion point to select characters to copy, delete, or format.
5. When you’re done entering your changes, click the Commit button.