🚀 go-pugleaf

> I find that changing the hyphenation zone setting between a normally small value and zero has no effect on the result.

The hyphenation zone is active only when the single-line composer is selected.

> Balance ragged lines is primarily meant for headings, not for regular text.

Not so. It is described as being especially useful for headings and the like, but it works perfectly fine for ranged text.

Nicholas, I also don't see any word or character spacing or glyph scaling having any effect under any circumstances, but I'm not worried by that. I guess the working assumption Adobe made was that people set ranged type to achieve even word spacing and that if they wanted very even type they would just set justified text in the first place. I have some sympathies with that view. If you had the paragraph composer taking maximum and minimum settings into account and aiming to balance lines (as you want), wouldn't you just end up with justified text? Or near enough as to just make it look like something got screwed up?