Good afternoon.
When I am not staring out the windows today, I am working on the finishing touches of a document - all I have left to do is some picayune formatting. Which brings me to today’s frustration.
The text’s margins are set to 2.25, giving me one column along the right side of the page. (I have bulleted points in the space left over on the left). To make it pretty, I have the right hand text justified. Looks great. Except for one or two places where Word puts a larger amount of space between words than is necessary. I end up with two or so lines at the end of the paragraph with relatively fewer words per line, and lots more space. This looks ugly, and I am trying to find a way to fix it before sending it along to the client. Is there a way I can keep the text justified, yet control the number of words per line I use?
If I didn’t do a good job explaining my problem, or you want to see what I am talking about for yourself, copy the next paragraph to Word (WinNT 97). The passage is in Ariel 11 point. Adjust the indentation to 2.25, and justify it. You should see what I am talking about. Thanks!
The offending paragraph:
Fernández estimated in the early 1980s that in Rota (Cádiz) the species abundance was between 3 and 35 chameleons/hectare, with an average of 16 chameleons / hectare.
Surely. Just go to one of the lines that may have a few too many words in it, place your cursor before the last word, and hold down the shift key while you hit enter.
That will insert what’s called a soft return. It breaks the line without starting a new paragraph, so the justification stays.
If you do this sort of thing a lot, you need a page layout app. They’re expensive, so you only want one if the formatting of documents is a major thing. But they are so much better at typography. If you get Adobe InDesign, you may never see a poorly spaced paragraph again.
Other layout apps have their own strengths, but InDesign has the best composition, bar none.
The real question is: How many chameleons per hectare are in Cadiz now?
Well, according to the Andalusian National Parks, Wildlife and Nature Reserves Official Website:
Now, the site has no date, but I assume, from the glamorous color sheme used, that it is recently updated. Nevertheless, to answer Germ Boy’s question, I think that, since the site makes no reference of a shortage of Cadizian Chameleons (good name for a band!), we can rest easy in the knowlege that Fernández’s numbers from the early 1980’s are still accurate.
Rhythmdvl, you could do what Saltire suggests but that will make the last line of the paragraph completely justified, and it isn’t normally necessary to do that. (If you did want to do that, you would have to put soft returns throughout the text in order to make the very last line have roughly the same number of characters as all the other lines.) I think your original problem was caused by ending the paragraph itself with a soft return instead of a regular hard return. Copy the text below into Word, turn on your editing marks (that’s the little parapoint up next to the “View percentage” pull-down menu) so you can see the hard-return mark, and you will see the difference in layout when using a hard return instead of a soft return at the end like you originally typed. Fixes everything.
Fernández estimated in the early 1980s that in Rota (Cádiz) the species abundance was between 3 and 35 chameleons/hectare, with an average of 16 chameleons / hectare.
The last words on the justified right will be species and of. The last word of the final sentence in the paragraph will not rest at the right margin; it will be spaced normally.
I tried both of these and they worked with your example text. The key, of course, is to give Word the little extra bit of space that it needs and wants in order to make cleaner line breaks.
[ul]
[li]Change the margin to 2.2". That little amount should not disrupt your other formatting, and will not be discernable to the eye (unless you are dealing with a typographer).[/li][li]Adjust the character spacing. Select the paragraph and go to the second tab (Character Spacing) on the Font dialog box (Format | Font…). Change the Spacing to Condensed by 0.1 pts.[/li][/ul]
This is a pretty cheap way to accomplish your request. Saltire is right, Microsoft Word is a word processor, not a page layout application.