The space between certain words is larger than between other words; I'd like the spacing to be uniform, unless changing it is necessary to make the words fit on one line. Note, that the problem is present even on lines (such as titles) that are much shorter than the width of the page without margins. The text I'm working on is left-aligned, although I tried all the other kinds of alignment.
39 Answers
If there seems to be larger than normal spaces between the words when typing in Word 2010, go to: File> Options > Advanced > Display > Click on: “Optimize character positioning for layout rather than readability”
This will reduce the space size between the words. Will look like it did in Word 2003.
1I was puzzled by an extra 1/2" or so of spacing between a couple words here and there in a document I inherited from someone else. On closer inspection, I noted that it appeared on the same place on each page, the first line center of each page. And I noticed that there was a page number above each gap at top of page. I'm still not sure exactly how or why it does this, but I found if I increased the size of the header by dragging it's lower margin down a bit, that seem to give more leeway to this hidden protected zone around the page number, and the elusive gap went away.
I had this problem with an entire book that I was editing with an online text editor. When I copied back to my Word doc, I got giant spaces between some words that I couldn't eliminate. If I backspaced, the words would close together. Here was my solution: Edit-Cut the entire document that you want to correct. Go to Paste Special, and paste back in by selecting Styled Text You will lose some of your document setups, like text size, and paragraph indents. These are easily and quickly corrected. You won't lose italics, and bolds. The corrections only take a few minutes. You can use Paste Special and select Unformatted, but you will lose all formatting like subscript, superscript, colors, underlines, fonts, and bolds.
Both will eliminate the spacing problem. It's up to you which will work best for you. In my case, Styled Text worked best.
You have to correct the spacing between the words. Here's one way to do this:
- Select the text you want to edit
- Right Click and select Font
- Advanced tab and the chose the spacing you need.
Here's the screen shot:
I know you say you tried all forms of justification, but it still sounds as if you are somehow using "Force Justify".
If you use "Justify" as the alignment, Word will increase word spacing as necessary to keep the right margin straight. If you then press Shift-Enter at the end of the last line of text, that line is also stretched from margin to margin, regardless of how much or how little text is on the line.
I got to this question via my sister having difficulty with a similar sounding issue.
For her, it turned out she had accidentally "justified" the text, rather than having it left aligned. (Teamviewer is a godsend)
If this helps save anyone else a panic, try selecting some of the problem text and pressing Ctrl-L for left-alignment. Alternatively you might want it centre-aligned which is Ctrl-E.
The word positioning is optimized for printing, not for the screen. Letters have (slightly) different widths on different devices, and the spaces between words is where Word collects the extra.
In other words, if it would look perfect on the screen, it would not print nicely (or not even fit in a line anymore), and you would probably hate that even more.
You can try to change your default printer, and the layout should subtle change, but because printing is different from screens, it might not give you what you want with any printer.
I understand that this logic comes from a time where the ultimate goal of a word document was the printed paper, which today is not necessarily correct anymore, but that's how they built it.
I discovered an efficient way to adjust spacing between words. And i don't mean the incorrect answer of adjusting the general distances between all characters.
- Ctrl+H
- then switch to the find tab.
- in the 'find what' box simply press the space bar once
- choose reading highlight, 'highlight all'
- switch back to the replace tab
- in the 'replace what' box press the space bar once
- choose 'MORE'
- 'Format'
- 'font'
- select the advanced tab, 'spacing', and condense the spacing by how much you like, experiment to get the desired effect.
So what you are doing is changing the size of the space between i guess the edges of a space character, and the letters. that way you will narrow the spaces between words, without cramming letters into each other!
Alternately you could actually change the size of the font for all the spaces, but this could possibly cause problems for other things.
motto: Ctrl+H is your friend.
Did you try doing Shift + Enter?
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