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Tip of the Month |
"Squished" Justification
In one of the best Word tips I've ever seen, Dermod Quirke
wrote in WOW 6.40 (http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v6-n40
)
about a trick for greatly improving Word's ability to
justify text. Word, as it stands, will expand text to
justify a line. Dermod found a way to make Word squish text
together. Here's his update:
"My article about "squished" justification provoked an
enthusiastic response from readers. Thanks to all those who
rightly pointed out that it also works in Word 97. Thanks
also to the many aesthetes who assured me that
justification is no longer fashionable in the best circles,
and that people of refined taste now prefer ragged-right
text. But I say that's just cat's widdle -- the world's
finest typesetters have used justified text for five
centuries, and it's stood the test of history.
Several readers have reminded me that squishy justification
produces even better results if it's combined with
Condensed Character Spacing. This reduces the space between
letters, and if used sensibly it can produce a more compact
(but still easily readable) text which looks very good
indeed when squishy-justified.
Here's what to do. Select the text you want to condense.
Click Format/Font and the Character Spacing tab; now click
Spacing and select Condensed; then click By and type 0.2;
and finally click OK. (Or if you prefer the keyboard, type
Ctrl+D, Alt+R, Alt+S, C, Alt+B, 0.2, Enter). This reduces
the space between letters by 0.2 points, which works quite
well for 10-12 point text, but you can experiment with
other settings if you wish.
When you use condensed character spacing and squishy
justification together, you get a printout which is
dramatically better than Word's standard justification.
It's particularly effective in narrow columns. Try it, and
you'll see what I mean.
Finally, I received this wonderful message from a reader. I
reproduce it in full, because it gives a vivid picture of
life within Microsoft:
"I did support at Microsoft in the Word unit from v1.1a
through Word97, about four months before the release of
Office 2000. (That's a very long time in dog years.) I can
tell you that the reason Word's WYSIWYG is sometimes a
little shabby was basically performance, and the vagaries
of the continuous four-way conversation between the printer
driver, Windows GDI, the font rasterizer, and Word's layout
engine. These four items are interdependent and the
calculations are intense and performed basically at every
edit (= every *character* entered or removed; this is why
Normal View is still around). Sometimes third-party
printer drivers lie about stuff to Word or the GDI, or
Windows' rasterization of the font outline is faulty,
causing imprecise WYSIWYG at certain magnifications or
display resolutions. This is also assuming a quality font;
sometimes the fonts themselves are buggy or have crappy
kerning tables.
"In those days, the answer would have been, "Marketing be
damned, this isn't desktop publishing, it's a power-user's
document processor". The situation has changed fairly
dramatically since then, in that machines are vastly more
capable and can do the calculations without an unacceptable
degradation of performance: perhaps it's time Development
looked at Word's WYSIWYG again. Periodically, whole
features of Word are gutted and rewritten, as had to be
done to enable tables-within-tables for Word 2000 when the
band-aids and fig-leaves had reached the end of usefulness.
Perhaps the WYSIWYG is next. One can only hope..."