Originally posted by: Trooperman
Occasionally, I wouldn’t like the way that the lines were broken up, and so with the space bar, I nudged a word or to onto the next line to make the distribution better aesthetically.

Well, for starters, let me say I'm glad you are worrying about the word spacing, I hate uneven lines (and if I ever do my own edit of the SW films one of the first changes I will make is a new crawl with better spacing).

Now for the tip! I also used to use the space bar to manually push words to the next line of justified text, but now I know of a much simpler method. Open up the Paragraph palette in any of the recent Adobe apps, including Illustrator. Then click on that palette's contextual menu, the circular button with the right pointing triangle on the top right of most palettes. Two of the options in that menu will be 'Adobe Single-line Composer' and 'Adobe Every-line Composer'. These options decide how the program will calculate word spacing. Single-line, which you would be used to, only averages spacing for, obviously, a single-line, whereas Every-line calculates it for the entire paragraph. It usually finds the best spacing solution automatically! If you decide to switch to it, remember to delete the spaces you've already added. If in your opinion it doesn't calculate the best spacing option for a particular paragraph then you'll need to change that back to Single-line and manually space again.

I just did a quick test of your crawl, and while I likely didn't have the text box at your exact width I did end up with a satisfactory result, the same spacing as your final. In this particular case it only made the one change, the 'of' in the first sentence, but you could probably guess how much faster it is to produce books and magazines with that feature!

DVD cover designers, remember this tip also for your synopsis too!