You notice the way every published book is never fully justified? In that, I mean that if you reach the end of the line and the word doesn't fit, it gets a hyphen and is continued on the next line. I used to know what this was called and how to do it on Word '03, but I've forgotten now and was wondering if anyone can tell me how to do it for Word '07. Thank you.
why do you want to use it? It looks much worse than using an extra line, and if you want all the lines to fit perfectly then do what some editors do and in the sentence you want a few characters longer, make the spaces double spaces. Or type into the search bar in the top right of word and search "Double-space lines in a document".
You can turn on automatic hyphenation, and also adjust the size of the hyphenation zone. Hyphenation settings can be found on the Page Layout tab. About the only time you would probably want to use this is if you were laying something out in narrow columns, like what you would find in a newspaper article. As othman pointed out, it's rather ugly. Left justification without hyphenating to break words os preferable for almost all writing. Manuscripts should always use left-justify, no autohyphenation.
Ugly? I don't understand. I'd venture to say that every novel ever published has hyphenation (that was the word I was looking for; thanks, Cog) along the right hand sides of the pages. It's the norm. It may not be the norm for submitting to a publisher, but it is for a published novel.
while it may be used in actual books, as noted above, no one should ever use it for a ms that is to be submitted, unless you're submitting it to a self-publishing venue or printer, and have to send it print-ready... fyi, i have to do this for my printer, but i don't use hyphenation, since it's so annoying from a reader's pov... when a line is too widely spaced without hyphenating, i'll reword the piece to make the line 'close up' rather than break up words...
Pick up a novel off your shelf, open it to a random page, and I guarantee you you'll see at least one line hyphenated along the right hand side. It's the norm.
Ok You generalize too much. Some novels do it and that is a fact, but you can usually tell what publishers will and won't. TSR used to do that, but ever since Wizards of the Coast has taken over that is no longer the case. TOR is another that I have never seen that convention in over a series of novels. Like Cog said it is annoying and mostly found in newspapers or pamphlets.
I'm not generalising, and I don't see how it's annoying. You hardly notice it while reading. I've just opened ten random novels by ten different authors. They all have hyphenates. If I open ten more, chances are they'll all have hyphenates too. Edit: It doesn't matter. Never mind, I've found out how to do it. Thank you.
True. Prospective publishers need to see every full word then judge how best to present them in printing. So all ms should be right justified, with no words split up & hyphenated. Anything I print fully justified is to see it for myself or show others than publishers. I use Word2003, the full justification option is apparent, but I don't know how you can do it. I used Word2007 only very briefly over a year ago. You'll have to hit the Help & enter "full justification" in the search box.
Minor correction: All manuscripts should be left justified (also called ragged right - I was a typographer for seven years, before there was desktop publishing software and word processors were common ) Cady
it's actually called 'left-aligned' as there is no 'justification' which is only what happens when the words on each line are spaced out to make both margins even... and for those who don't seem to know, the justified margin icon [+ align right/left and centered ones], is in the 'tools' menu at the top of your word document can be dragged from there to the tool bar of your document window... all you do is click on 'tools' go down and select 'customize' and there, go to 'format' where you can scroll down the icons to the ones you want to drag onto your tool bar, so they'll be there whenever you open a new document window to start a piece of work....
I was using the typography term, sorry - should have looked it up *in* Word. In a typography house, we didn't use the the term "left-aligned"; mostly what was used was "rag right", abbreviated "rr", but often left justified as well. It's hard for me to make the jump down to word processing sometimes, even though it's been years since I was a typographer. lol The other two you'll hear me use are "rules" (borders/lines in Word) and "leading" (the distance baseline to baseline in the text - line spacing in Word). If I slip up and start using those, nobody ever knows what I'm talking about. And in my head, I still measure everything on a page in points and picas. Regardless, it's definitely not right-justifed/right-algned - lol. Cady
