Sometimes you may see too much space between the words, after you justify your paragraph text. Obviously, we want to remove those spaces.
This doesn’t look good while self-publishing an eBook, printed book, or simply any article or report. Here’s how to get rid of those gaps within your paragraphs.
Actually, there are two ways to remove spaces in justified text:
- Hyphenation,
- Kerning for Fonts.
1. The first method is to use Hyphenation settings in your document.
Tip: Watch the video clip above for a demo of how to do everything we discuss in this guide post.
- Click on the Layout tab group,
- select Hyphenation drop-down to choose Automatic or Manual.
- The gaps automatically correct itself by adding hyphens to the broken words, thus removing the gaps between the words.
- Doing this manually would mean, it asks you for every hyphenated word whether you want to keep it or not.
2. The second method is to use ‘Kerning for fonts‘.
It’s the spacing between the characters, and this spacing is mostly different for every font face we use.
- You can get to the Font kerning settings by clicking on the tiny arrow to open the Font settings dialog box,
- then click on the Advanced tab
- and then select the check box.
- Then play around with the scale, spacing settings by testing various points here to see which works best in your situation.
NEVER do this as a default setting for the entire document, this is only for specific instances where you see abnormally wide gaps.
Additionally, you can also enable the setting from File – Options – Advanced – “Don’t expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT + RETURN“.
Once done, it auto-adjusts the spacing for the last line in your paragraph.
This setting will also apply to your entire document.
To conclude,
- Remember that a paragraph that has not been hyphenated is much easier to read.
- Hyphenate only when text is trapped in columns or in other narrow places, or when you want a very formal-looking document. Otherwise, follow the second method.
I hope you liked or learned something from this post.
Thanks for reading, and you take care!
