Re: [libreoffice-users] Libre Writer 5.1.1.3 - space correction between text words

At 13:55 28/04/2016 -0400, Charles Meyer wrote:
> I'm trying to adjust spaces between characters in text words 
> formatted for a resume.

I very much hope you are not. Unless you are German and using letter 
spacing to indicate emphasis, you should not be tinkering with 
spacing between characters within words (as you clearly describe 
here) unless you are an expert in typography and fonts.

> I have the paragraph symbol turned on so I can see that paragraph 
> icon at the end of every line of text.

Again, this is very much what you should not be seeing. That symbol 
shows the end of a paragraph, so it definitely should not be 
appearing at the end of each line of text. Unless your message has 
been delayed from the second millennium, you should not be using a 
typewriter but a word processor, in which text within a paragraph 
flows naturally between lines as necessary to fit the page size and 
margins. If those end-of-paragraph marks show at the end of each 
line, you have unwisely broken your real paragraphs into separate 
one-line paragraphs - which will prevent the word processor doing its 
job effectively. The one exception to this is if the passage consists 
of a set of separate items each of less than a full line, as a 
bulleted or numbered list might do in a document such as you describe 
- but even then not for the whole document.

> Some text words have larger spaces between the words than others. 
> The larger spaces make the sentences look awkward because the spaces 
> between the words are too large. Other text words look appropriately 
> close to the following word. Is there some way to adjust this 
> spacing between text words?

Good: you are now talking instead about spacing between words, not 
within words.

Text can be distributed within lines in various ways: left aligned, 
centred, right aligned, or justified. The first three modes will 
maintain constant, standard spacing between words, but the last 
intentionally expands spaces between words in order to fill all lines 
with text between the margins. If you don't want your text justified, 
don't use that mode. The mode is specified on the Alignment tabs of 
the Paragraph and Paragraph Style dialogues.

Note that for justified text, there is an ambiguity of how the last 
line of a paragraph should be treated. Often this is not justified, 
so it will instead have standard word spacing. But it is possible to 
have such lines also justified, at the expense of possibly much 
larger word spacing - even unattractively so. If your text includes a 
genuine list of single-line paragraphs and you have this option 
selected, the line spacing may well appear strange and ugly. You can 
choose left alignment instead or you can disable the justification of 
final lines of justified paragraphs by choosing an option other than 
Justified for "Last line" on the Alignment tab of the Paragraph or 
Paragraph Style dialogue.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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