Line Spacing

[Dale C. Myers]

Word has bunches of shortcuts. One that I have used to adjust spacing
between paragraphs is Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] acting on the empty paragraph between
the ones I want to space.

Now, I need a similar shortcut to adjust the line spacing.

In know about Ctrl+1 and 2 and 5, but I mean by *one point at a time.* I can
use Format | Paragraph | Line Spacing | Exactly, but there is nothing short
about this, and you have to go through the whole thing every time you want
to up or down a point.

Also, I know about styles, but the people who are going to use this don't.
It needs to be really simple.

Thanks.

Dale

 

[Mark Tangard]

Dale,

You'll need a macro, which you can then assign to a shortcut key:

Sub SquishSpacing
With Selection.ParagraphFormat
.LineSpacing = .LineSpacing - 1
End With
End Sub

I'm sure you understand doing this is heresy of a sort; manually
formatting body text is asking for trouble down the line. But
I ain't saying I've never done it either. Just be aware you're
venturing to the dark side, angering the gods, yadda yadda, etc.

One other point to consider: Reducing linespacing by 1 point at
a time doesn't give you much leeway. Most fonts contain about
20% leading when single-spaced. So for example, a 10-point font
sits within a zone about 12 points high, meaning you could use
this macro on a given chunk of text only a few times before it
starts to look ridiculous. If you're actually looking for a
smaller change each time, use an increment smaller than the "1"
shown in the code above.

If macros are still foreign to you, you'll want to change that.
See http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/CreateAMacro.htm to
create and use the one above.

 

[martinique]

Mark's explained how to do it; but I second his comment about heresy: every
deviation from style means extra work later on.

And I'm very sceptical that a user who can't understand styles will
understand line-spacing. My experience is that most users have zero
appreciation of any features of typography whatsoever.

And separately, using empty paragraphs to control the inter-paragraph
spacing is a TERRIBLE idea. SpaceBefore and SpaceAfter are much simpler, and
won't leave spurious spaces at the tops of pages.

 

[Mark Tangard]

So very true. Dale, if you're still reading: Getting folks to
use SpaceBefore to separate paragraphs may seem even more daunting
than teaching styles per se, but the advantages it confers during
editing and reprocessing are immense. Most notably, it lets you
shove paragraphs around without the constant extra tedium of making
sure you take the empty separator line above or below what you're
moving. (Thanks to a carefully planned demo, almost everyone at my
firm has learned this, and nobody seems to miss the typewriterish
double-return.)

About the only times the CTRL+] and CTRL+[ shortcuts are legitimate
are (1) when modifying a character style so you can then immediately
then redefine it on the fly, and (2) in spots where you'll always be
tweaking font sizes manually and eyeballing the appearance, like on
a title page.

--
Mark Tangard <[email protected]>, Microsoft Word MVP
Please reply ONLY to the newsgroup, not by email.
"Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." --John Waters

Mark's explained how to do it; but I second his comment about heresy: every
deviation from style means extra work later on.

And I'm very sceptical that a user who can't understand styles will
understand line-spacing. My experience is that most users have zero
appreciation of any features of typography whatsoever.

And separately, using empty paragraphs to control the inter-paragraph
spacing is a TERRIBLE idea. SpaceBefore and SpaceAfter are much simpler, and
won't leave spurious spaces at the tops of pages.

Word has bunches of shortcuts. One that I have used to adjust spacing
between paragraphs is Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] acting on the empty paragraph between
the ones I want to space.

Now, I need a similar shortcut to adjust the line spacing.

In know about Ctrl+1 and 2 and 5, but I mean by *one point at a time.* I can
use Format | Paragraph | Line Spacing | Exactly, but there is nothing short
about this, and you have to go through the whole thing every time you want
to up or down a point.

Also, I know about styles, but the people who are going to use this don't.
It needs to be really simple.

Thanks.

Dale

 

[Dale C. Myers]

Thanks to all for their comments, and especially to Mark Tangard for the
macro. It is exactly what I need, and when I changed the value from 1 point
to 0.1 point it is even better. When I connect that and its counterpoint
with + sign to shortcut keys, it will knock them dead.

And, futher thanks to Mark (plus all the 'heresy' comments) I have two
similar macros for SpaceAfter (SpaceBefore is not an issue here). You can
tell that I don't write many macros, only record them, and there is a lot of
stuff that recording doesn't capture.

But I am still fighting an uphill battle. I got (mildly) chastized the other
day when I inadvertently left the "Show/Hide" button pushed after I finished
using someone else's computer. Later, I got a phone call to ask why the
files in the dialog box were no longer in alphabetic order, and how to get
them back that way. More inadvertance.

So, more information about Mark's "carefully planned demo" might be helpful.

Thanks again for all the support.

Dale

Dale,

You'll need a macro, which you can then assign to a shortcut key:

Sub SquishSpacing
With Selection.ParagraphFormat
.LineSpacing = .LineSpacing - 1
End With
End Sub

I'm sure you understand doing this is heresy of a sort; manually
formatting body text is asking for trouble down the line. But
I ain't saying I've never done it either. Just be aware you're
venturing to the dark side, angering the gods, yadda yadda, etc.

One other point to consider: Reducing linespacing by 1 point at
a time doesn't give you much leeway. Most fonts contain about
20% leading when single-spaced. So for example, a 10-point font
sits within a zone about 12 points high, meaning you could use
this macro on a given chunk of text only a few times before it
starts to look ridiculous. If you're actually looking for a
smaller change each time, use an increment smaller than the "1"
shown in the code above.

If macros are still foreign to you, you'll want to change that.
See http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/CreateAMacro.htm to
create and use the one above.

--
Mark Tangard <[email protected]>, Microsoft Word MVP
Please reply ONLY to the newsgroup, not by private mail.
"Life is nothing if you're not obsessed." --John Waters

Word has bunches of shortcuts. One that I have used to adjust spacing
between paragraphs is Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] acting on the empty paragraph between
the ones I want to space.

Now, I need a similar shortcut to adjust the line spacing.

In know about Ctrl+1 and 2 and 5, but I mean by *one point at a time.* I can
use Format | Paragraph | Line Spacing | Exactly, but there is nothing short
about this, and you have to go through the whole thing every time you want
to up or down a point.

Also, I know about styles, but the people who are going to use this don't.
It needs to be really simple.

Thanks.

Dale

 

[Mark Tangard]

So, more information about Mark's "carefully planned demo" might
be helpful.

First, buy the high-quality thumbscrews so they can't escape.

Actually it didn't take much work beyond extensive testing of a
pair of well-prepared sample documents. If possible, don't even
use the same PC; put two side-by-side and have the empty-paragraph
version of the document open on one PC and the SpaceBefore/After
version on the other. Use a page (and a zoom level) that shows
about 4-5 paragraphs, and engage Show/Hide to display the codes.
(This might be a good time to euthanize the people who get upset
over them....)

Then demonstrate selecting a paragraph and cutting it to move
it up or down, emphasizing the extra steps and thinking required
to do it on the empty-paragraph version. If you're feeling
especially cocky you can "stack the deck" a bit by using the
two-clicks-in-the-margin method to select the paragraph on the
"nice" document, since the lion's share of users don't know
about this, and anything that jazzes them briefly predisposes
them to accept other suggestions. Also, immediately show them
the the Paragraph-Up and Paragraph-Down shortcuts (CTRL+Up and
CTRL+Down), which work as intended *except* in the empty-paragraph
version.

Granted, Microsoft has squirreled away many more useful shortcuts,
(e.g., the built-in but un-shortcutted commands to go forward or
backward by one sentence), and you can dispense these in small
quantities later. (Remember that most users hesitate to learn
too many tricks at once, even if they enjoy each one.)

If you're charged with the care & feeding of Word and its users
at your organization and you have any "free time" (oh! ah! oww!),
you may want to wade into some of the simpler elements of Word
macros and begin writing (rather than recording) some to handle
tasks that users find tedious or repetitive. Every organization
can benefit from someone who gets even halfway into that stuff.
For reasons already stated I'd shy away from macros that commit
manual formatting if at all possible. Plenty of other VBA-like
things can save your users time and nerves; often all it takes
is a few minutes of listening to someone's complaints to spark
an idea that'll smooth out a difficult task. After the initial
admittedly nasty learning curve, VBA macros can be a real boon
to the bottom line. I typically write or refine 2 or 3 every
day, and the time savings are often immediate.