Getting Rid of Choppiness in Justified Text

Depending on the characteristics of the text in your document, you might notice that justifying a paragraph may not produce the best looking results. This is because when you choose to justify a paragraph, Word expands the text on each line by adding space between words and letters. You may need to make adjustments to get better-looking text.

There are many options you can try, and you should become familiar with all of them so that you can try them out on your text. The first guideline is to check your text; there may be some things you can do to it that will allow cleaner flow through a paragraph:

• Be sure you have no unnecessary hard spaces or hard hyphens (search and replace ^s with regular space, ^~ with regular hyphen). These force Word to treat adjacent words as a single item, thereby forcing awkward end-of-line adjustments.
• Turning on hyphenation or doing manual hyphenation on offending lines similarly reduces the risk of awkward line breaks.
• Select a font size suited to the line length, or vice versa. Large fonts need longer lines to maintain smooth spacing; smaller fonts can afford shorter lines.

With your text in shape, you can then begin actual formatting. One approach is to open the Font dialog box (press Ctrl+D) and display the Character Spacing tab (Word 2007) or click on the Advanced tab to find the Character Spacing group (Word 2010 or a later version). Set the Scale to 95%. If that does not provide better spacing, select 90% from the drop-down list. These adjustments are typically so slight (particularly with commonly used font sizes for body text) that readers won't notice, but the effect on text flow could be dramatic—particularly in long paragraphs.

Perhaps the best solution, however, is to completely change the algorithm that Word uses to justify text. Many people prefer the algorithm used in WordPerfect, so Microsoft added the ability to emulate that justification method—resulting in much less choppiness. This option is available in Word 2007 and Word 2010; it was removed starting with Word 2013. Follow these steps to adjust the setting if you are using Word 2007:

1. Click the Office button and then click Word Options. Word displays the Word Options dialog box.
2. At the left of the dialog box click Advanced.
3. Scroll to the very end of the options in the dialog box.
4. Click the plus sign to the left of Layout Options. Word shows a long list of compatibility options it can use. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The compatibility options available in Word.

1. Choose the Do Full Justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows option.
2. If you want to make this setting the default for your system, click the Default button.
3. Click OK to close the Word Options dialog box.

Here are the steps if you are using Word 2010:

1. Click the File tab and then choose Options to open the Word Options dialog box.
2. At the left of the dialog box click Advanced.
3. Scroll to the very end of the options in the dialog box.
4. Click the small triangle to the left of Layout Options. Word shows a long list of compatibility options it can use.
5. Choose the Do Full Justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows option.
6. You can make this setting the default for your system by using the Compatibility Options For drop-down list, click All New Documents.
7. Click OK to close the Word Options dialog box.

This will change the way justification is handled, but only for the current document. If you clicked the Default button, then the change is made in the Normal template, provided you choose to save changes to the template when you exit Word. With the change made in the template, then all future documents based on the Normal template will use the different justification algorithm. If you want to make the same change in other templates or other documents, you will need to load them and make the adjustment. If you have many documents that you might need to change (or if you routinely work with documents from others that you need to change), then you can create a macro that will modify the justification setting:

Sub ChangeJustification()
    With ActiveDocument
        .Compatibility(wdWPJustification) = True
    End With
End Sub

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8139) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Getting Rid of Choppiness in Justified Text.