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Spread Alignment

In a printed book, the lines of body text on the left page should sit at the same heights as the lines on the right page. When your book has a mix of fonts, sizes, and spacings on different elements, those elements may not be a perfect multiple of the body text height. The lines drift out of step and the left and right pages stop matching.

Spread Alignment fixes this. You’ll find it under Print Settings in the Page Setup group.

Grid Snapping

Grid Snapping nudges your content onto the body text grid so the lines of the left and right pages stay perfectly in sync.

Under Apply to, choose the mode that matches your book:

  • Disabled: Leaves paragraphs at their natural position. Facing pages may end at slightly different heights.
  • Every Paragraph: Aligns all paragraphs. This is the strongest alignment, and the best choice for books with a lot of mixed elements like callouts, blockquotes, tables, and varied subheadings. It may add a little extra space around subheadings and images.

Spread Balancing (Beta)

Grid Snapping keeps lines on the grid; Spread Balancing goes one step further. Turn on Balance facing pages and Lacuna runs an extra solver pass so the facing pages of a spread end on the same bottom baseline, giving every spread a clean, even foot.

Once Balance facing pages is on, three controls tune how the solver works:

Run balancing

  • Live preview: Balances as you work, so the print preview matches the printed result. Recommended, and fast enough to leave on.
  • Export only: Skips balancing in the preview and applies it just to the final export. Use it if previews feel slow on a very large book.

Allow widow/orphan violations

Some spreads can’t balance without bending the rules. When this switch is on, the solver may break a widow or orphan to reach a balance on those harder spreads. Leave it off to keep your widows and orphans intact; stubborn spreads stay slightly uneven instead.

Line removal

To make facing pages end together, balancing sometimes pulls a line or two off the longer page. Line removal sets how many lines it may move:

  • Orphans: The default. Keeps every page at its orphan minimum and never moves an extra line.
  • Orphans + 1, Orphans + 2, Orphans + 3: Let more spreads balance by allowing one, two, or three extra lines to move, at the cost of a little more rearranging.