How do they get their columns so straight? It would be a little tricky even with a fixed-width font. But it looks more like a Times New Roman than a Fixedsys or Courier, which never aligns straight for me. And I’ve counted the characters, including spaces, and they vary from sentence to sentence. So it’s definitely not monospaced. Am I missing something obvious here?
They adjust the width of the spaces between the characters.
actually with some computer programs there is a button that allows you to allign the text in your collumns. the button look something like this:
hope this helped some…
CJo
The spaces between the characters and the words are adjusted to the text lines up on either side. Your word processing program has a function to do this for you, as well.
In something with relatively skinny columns, such as a newspaper, you sometimes end up with a single word stretched very thinly accross a single line, because the next word is too big to fit. That’s kinda funny.
There is also a lot of finessing. At my magazine, I note when columns’ words are too spread-apart or too tight, and the production manager has to go in and re-kern them (I think that’s the right word).
Some of our columns are also “rag-right,” where the right-hand side is, well, ragged. Problem there is you can’t break a word to continue on the next line, which leads us into other “need to fiddle with this” problems.
Is that the justify function, CJo?
I’m at a magazine here, anyway, and I don’t know the name of the trick, but what we use is a “soft return,” which also changes the spacing so that the words will fill up the entire space in the column. I hope that makes sense, and I hope I’m answering what you’re asking. I guess the width isn’t fixed: you can futz with it if the column is going too long, or if you have an awkward break. [It’s considered aesthetically bad to leave a line with only one word, or sometimes two short words, in it. It’s called a “widow.” That’s why you do the aforementioned trick; to get rid of them.]
please don’t hurt meeee!!! 
thats the function i used when i was working on the NYTimes. microsoft word is my prosessor…others might have diffrent ones…