- #How to write in left and right margin in word manual#
- #How to write in left and right margin in word professional#
#How to write in left and right margin in word professional#
But doing it properly requires a careful designer using a professional page-layout program. And it also saves space, because playing with spacing and hyphenation allows you to fit more words on a page. When it’s done properly, with good letter spacing, word spacing, and hyphenation, justified text is pleasing to the eye.
Word documents simply should not be justified.Īfter chewing that over, I’ve come to see that Ellen’s explanation makes sense. Many beautiful books are set in single-column justified pages, but they have been properly typeset. So it’s not really the column width that’s the problem, but rather limitations in the software.
The reason that text with justified margins looks bad in a single-column Word document is that subtle word-spacing and letter-spacing algorithms are needed to make justified text look “good,” and Word’s aren’t up the job. It’s a very informative and wonderfully designed book. She’s also author of Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students. Ellen is director of the MFA program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. So if the per-line character count isn’t an adequate explanation, what is? For insight, I consulted Ellen Lupton. See if you agree with me: here is a two-column document with justified, one-inch-margin, 12-point Times New Roman text here is the same document with a ragged right margin. For one thing, I find text with justified margins annoying in word-processed documents even when the per-line character count is within recommended limits, as in a two-column document. That help wouldn’t be available when the margins are justified.īut I now think that’s an insufficient explanation for what makes justified text harder to read. I also thought that because of the high per-line character count, the eye relies that much more on a ragged right margin to help you not lose track of which line you’re on. The high per-line character count in contracts and other word-processed legal documents certainly makes them harder to read. (By the way, I’m not taking into account two-column documents: after flirting with a two-column format, I decided, with the help of some prodding by readers, that it wouldn’t be viable for contracts.) For example, Felici says that “the optimal line length is nine or ten words (figure an average of 5 1/2 characters a word),” in other words around 50 to 55 characters. That’s more than any recommended limits I’ve seen. (That’s the explanation I offer in MSCD 12.3.)Īn unjustified line of 12-point Times New Roman on letter-sized paper with one-inch margins (the standard setup at law firms) contains on average between 77 and 80 characters. I used to think that the problem was that by normal typographic standards, word-processed documents on letter-sized paper contain a relatively high number of characters. I’ve long wondered what renders justified harder to read. If you wish to do a quick readability test of your own, here is a document with justified, one-inch-margin, 12-point Times New Roman text here is the same document with a ragged right margin. This creates an irregular margin along the right side of the text column.Īlthough as a general matter I have no problem reading justified text, I dislike it intensely in word-processed documents, including contracts, because I find that it makes them much harder to read.
On lines that do not fully fill the measure (nearly all of them), any leftover space is deposited along the right-hand margin. Ragged right A text margin treatment in which all lines begin hard against the left-hand margin but are allowed to end short of the right-hand margin. The conventional alternative is a ragged right margin. To achieve justified margins, a composition program must flex the spaces on a line, compressing them or expanding them. This creates straight, (usually) vertical margins on both left and right. Justified margins A text alignment in which the type in each line of a column completely fills the measure.
#How to write in left and right margin in word manual#
Here’s how James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography (2003), defines “justified margins”: In most printed text that I read, whether in books, magazines, or newspapers, the margins are justified.
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