Microsoft Word - Adjusting the line spacing in a document

StuckInTheSixties:

Okay, I know how to go from single spacing to 1.5 or double spacing. That's not what I want.

I also know how to highlight a section of text (such as a paragraph), and change the spacing from, say, 12 pt. to 11 pt. That's not what I want.

What I want is to be able to highlight a portion of text, and to just barely squeeze the spacing a tiny bit. Just to make this clear, let me explain what I'm wanting to do, and why:

First, I'll explain verbally what the problem is:

I have a text document, and because of the appearance I'm trying to have, I don't want to change anything with the margins, the empty top/bottom areas, etc. Nor do I want to change the font size (or the font itself. I basically want to keep everything EXACTLY as it is, but have the spacing between the lines of text reduced just the tiniest amount.

Why do I want to do this?

Because the amount of text, and the way it's formatted on this document, has caused the very last line of text to go onto a separate page, and I want to squeeze it a little bit to get it all on one page, but basically preserve everything else just the way it is.

Because a visual representation might help here, let me sort of draw a picture here, and hopefully this will make sense. In drawing this picture, a row of asterisks ***** will represent both the top and bottom of the page.

Here's a "picture" of what I have now (that I want to fix) :


First page

************* top edge of page *************************

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text


*************bottom edge of page ***********************





Second page

************* top edge of page *************************

text text text text text



































*************bottom edge of page ***********************





Okay … see how that last little bit of text has had to go on a second page, all by itself?

What I want to do is squeeze things just a tiny bit so that it’ll all fit on one page, and it’ll look like this:





Only page

************* top edge of page *************************

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text


*************bottom edge of page ***********************

Geoff: Adjust the margins

Adjust the text size by fractions of a point

Depends on which exact version of Word you are using.

Geoff: And...

Why did you post this as a forum topic instead of asking me directly?

//Edit - forgot the - not that I wanted to wink at you, I just wanted to be sure that everyone knew I wasn't being overly serious.

StuckInTheSixties:

As said above, I don't want to adjust margins. (There's a reason for that too lengthy to detail here.)

"Adjust text size" ... do you mean "font size"? I Googled ...

"microsoft word 2003 adjust text size"

(that answers your question about which version)

... and every response referred to "font size." Attempting to adjust font size by fractions of a point results in the response: "This is not a valid number." (It has to be a whole number, IE 12 point, 11, point, 10 point, etc.)

Geoff, I didn't ask you directly because I am a little sheepish to repeatedly hit on you (or any individual) for that sort of advice. I guess I'm wanting to avoid the appearance of taking you for granted that way.

Years ago I was a Mac user, and I used some sort of word processing program (the name of which I've forgotten) that allowed a very simple, LOGICAL fix for my problem here - a problem that seems to me like it would be very common ... you basically want to preserve the everything in your document exactly as you have it (for all sorts of reasons) ... but you want to shrink the spacing just a tiny bit to pull that stray bit of text onto the preceding page without changing anything else.

That program I used allowed for micro-adjustments to line spacing of highlighted text, for instance, to change single spaced text (1.0) to a tiny bit less than single spaced text (0.99) ...

A tiny adjustment like that was very convenient. The result is that you can't see any apparent changes whatsoever in your document - the adjustment is too small to see with the naked eye - except that now that stray text at the end that had been bumped to its own page now somehow has room to fit on the page with the rest of the text.

The document at issue was typed at 12 pt. font. I could, of course, reduce to 11, but that creates two drawbacks:

~~ Smaller font, less easy to read
~~ It's a crude adjustment resulting in a big empty space at the bottom of the document, as opposed to the visual elegance of the page being perfectly filled right to the bottom. I've found that making margin adjustments results in the same kind of lesser-quality "fix."

If it's possible to do, making that micro-adjustment of line spacing is the obvious best fix, because it avoids both of those drawbacks. I remember that I wound up using it a lot, either increasing, or decreasing the line spacing at my whim for all sorts of reasons.

If it's not possible to do that with Word, then Word sucks. (laughs)

Nythe: There is a "shrink to fit" feature in word. I don't know if it will help you...very possible you already tried it and didn't like how it looked?

StuckInTheSixties:

It results in a big space left on the bottom of the page. It's too crude of an adjustment. If there was a way to do what it does, but incrementally, then it would work.

Nythe: If it is a document you want to print...have you tried to change the size of paper in your settings?


Just as many photocopy machines have a reduce/enlarge feature, Microsoft Word offers different ways to scale a document for printing, enabling you to avoid adjusting margins or line breaks.

NOTE When you scale a document for printing, the changes only occur when you print. Word does not change the settings in the document itself.

On the File menu, click Print.
Under Zoom, click the option you want in the Scale to paper size box.
For example, you can specify that a B4-size document prints on A4-size paper.

(copied)
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word-help/scale-a-document-to-fit-on-different-paper-sizes-HP005241350.aspx?CTT=3

Nythe: Ohhh, this might help. Looks like you can do a custom fit.

http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/FitCopy.htm

How to add a “Condensed Font” toolbar button
Note: The following is applicable only to Word 2003 and earlier. If you have already created custom toolbar buttons in earlier versions, you can import a custom toolbar into Word 2007, but you cannot add these buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) individually.

In Word's Customize dialog, select the All Commands category on the Commands tab. In the list of commands, scroll to the “Condensed:” item. When you select this item, a spin box appears at the bottom of the dialog, from which you can select a measurement from 0.10 to 12.70 points. After you have selected the desired amount, drag the command to a toolbar. There is no built-in icon for this command, so you'll have to select one of the available button images or design your own. I drew one that looks like “>.1” because that suggested to me decreasing (decrescendo) by 0.1 point.

Nythe: Gotta fly, supper time. Good Luck.

StuckInTheSixties:

See, all of these things are tedious, complex procedures. I was hoping for something simple, something easy that I was unaware of just out of lack of knowledge of the program.

When I was using that other program, this situation would go something like this:


"Oh, shit. Look at that little bit of stray text making it's own page. Okay, let's fix it."

Highlight all the text (ctrl-A)

Click "Adjust line spacing."

Change the numeric value from 1.0 to 0.99

See that it wasn't enough, repeat, change the numeric value to 0.95

See that it worked, but was just a little too much, repeat, splitting the difference and giving 0.97 a shot. See it works, and accurately enough so that your eye can't see any error.

That would take all of 10 or 15 seconds to do, and make everything look nice and tidy without changing anything else whatsoever.

I was really hoping that Word had the equivalent to that. It seems ridiculous that it doesn't.

Geoff: For future reference, you can adjust both paragraph and line spacing separately, you can also add commands to the toolbars in Word to quickly access these controls.

By using the buttons of the toolbars, you can fine tune the spacing without having to switch backwards and forwards to the 'paragraph formatting' window.

In Word 2007 (the version I have) you have a command to 'shrink to one page' in the Print Preview window. Admittedly, this will automatically adjust spacing and font size together.

StuckInTheSixties:

Ahhh ... I see how to do it!

Thanks, Geoff!

Geoff: yw

StuckInTheSixties:

Where I'd gone wrong before was assuming that it would be the selection of "Exactly" under "Line spacing." That seemed to be the "obvious" intuitive choice.

Ahh, but I always fail when I intuitively make any choice for anything on a computer.

I should know better ...

StuckInTheSixties:

lori10 is the Illuminati!

Don't be fooled otherwise!