I I am working on an MS in Word on my Mac and I am getting this odd spacing between words. Has anyone got any idea how to fix this?
I used to get that sometimes when pasting into a different word processor or app. I found that if I first paste it into something else and then info the final target app it could get rid of the problem. Let me see if I can remember... was it Google Docs? Not sure I was using that at the time. It might have been Blogger or Blogspot. I had a free account on both, and it seems like as soon as I pasted my text into one of them and from there into the final destination app or whatever it didn't have the weird spacing and color bars. Plus it fixed a few other things, like losing formatting for paragraph breaks etc. Just try pasting first into whatever other apps you have and from there into the final one. Or set yourself up a Google Docs page. It's free and simple, you don't have to download the app, just go to the website and create a new document. Oh, it might have been Evernote. Yeah, I think that's what it was. But I believe it also works with the other ones I mentioned.
If it’s a pasting issue you can also open a plain text file and paste there by holding down command+option+shift+v. That should remove any formatting and you can then cut and paste from there to Word.
Small chance, and you won't like this, that the Mac's a MacPro of a certain vintage. Mine was putting out double spaces and triple 'b's'.. it was driving me potty. All (avail-less) control panel tweaks and pulled out hair later had me off to the Apple store. 'New keyboard' they said, 'it's built in'. < That entailed a whole new bottom half of the laptop...and for good measure they invented an issue with the screen so as not to effect any repair whatsoever. But to write it off and hand me a shiny new (matt) one. £1500+ was the cost. V. lucky it was covered under a repair program (known fault). I did though lose all my data.
That's caused by using full justification. Shorter lines get fleshed out by expanding the spaces between words. It might be less obvious if Word would also expand the character spacing slightly -- but it doesn't, so we're stuck with it. It's more noticeable with relatively large type on relatively small pages (or narrow columns), because there are fewer spaces to make up the excess spacing required to justify the text. To get around it, either edit the sentence to change the word order, or manually play with character spacing. In the sample, for example, you could change "Dick woke once in the night ..." to "Dick woke once during the night" and see what that does to it. If you try that, I'd be curious to see what the result is. Or turn off justification, but we generally want books to be fully justified.
It turns out it about full justification. I have now justified the whole document to the left and this issue is gone.
The problem is most evident when you have narrow columns and large words, because there are comparatively few spaces per line. With long lines (wide columns and small type)and small words, there are so many spaces that it becomes much less perceptible.
