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Q. When I set a three- or four-line headline with an all-cap line, the spaces between the lines look uneven even though I set them with the same leading. Why is this, and what can I do to improve the situation?

A. Vertical alignment is often overlooked, as many people assume that numerically-consistent leading results in visual balance. But as you observed, this is not always so.

When setting several lines of text where a line, or part of a line, is set in all caps, the space above that line will appear to be visually smaller than the space above a line set in upper and lowercase (u&lc). That's because capital letterforms take up more headroom than a line set in mostly lowercase, even with the occasional ascender. To make matters worse, the shorter the x-height of a typeface, the more extreme the inequity appears.

The solution is to adjust the line spacing of the offending all-cap line (and any others that appear uneven) so that it visually matches the rest. This might result in a line spacing value that is numerically quite different from the rest, but the goal is to make the line spacing of the text look the same optically, not mathematically.

I set the example on the green background in 32/35 (32 point type with 35 point leading), but due to the third line set in all caps, the space above that line appears to be much less than between the rest. For the example on the yellow background, I increased the leading of the all-cap line to 42 -- a whopping seven points more than the rest. Set in Century Schoolbook Std.

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