The spacing of individual letters in Word could be way, way better. Justified text may look nice in newspapers and magazines, but that's because columns are narrower, so spreading the text out evenly across them doesn't result in as many awkward spaces as it does in a typical, 6.5-inch-wide line of text in a word-processing document.
Right-aligned text is just for special occasions, like setting the address on a cover letter. Here's one place where it's better to stick with the Word default setting. While many people tinker with font size, they forget to also adjust the margins. Do it using exact numbers in the Format menu. No matter what, don't set your margins by dragging and dropping. That way, the line length (the number of words per line) will stay comfortable for your reader. But if your type is much smaller, you'll want larger margins to keep the page nice and readable. The default margins on MS Word are 1 inch, which is just fine for the default 12-point text. Give your document some basic structure by setting the margins. With these marks displayed, you'll have a better sense of why your document looks the way it does-and why it doesn't look the way you want it to. Those are those little dots between words (spaces), the pilcrow (the backwards P at the end of a paragraph), and a slew of other faintly visible symbols that reveal underlying text layout.
When you want to get serious about page layout in any word processor, the first step is to turn on invisibles. (Whether the content is any good, though, is still up to you). With these tricks, you can make Word docs that actually look good. It's not that hard to outdo an animated paperclip, though. If you stick with the design defaults in Microsoft Word, you're not much better off than you would be with Clippy doing the legwork. Gone are the days when Clippy would pop up, offer to help you write a letter when you were typing up a resume, and generally insist on improperly formatting your Word document.
0 kommentar(er)
