odd formatting problem

[Tom Calvert]

Hi,

The problem I'm having is rather difficult to explain but I'll give it a
shot in the hope someone can help.

I'm working on my dissertation and, for the past few weeks, Word has been
behaving really weirdly. The text is meant to be fully justified but,
intermittently but most of the time, if I try to scroll through the document
or even when I load Word up, the text jumps back to the left with random
spaces between words, sometimes in the middle of words. All the lines
become different lengths with words split in two and big gaps between
others. But what's weird is that the spaces aren't actually there - if I
try to remove them by pressing delete in the right place, some characters a
bit further along get deleted instead.

So basically, the text is fine, but it's like Word has forgotten how to
display it, and everything looks different to how it actually is.

Obviously this is making editing and adding to the project extremely
difficult.

I used to have Word 98 and tried upgrading to Word 2002 to no avail.

Has anyone got any idea what might be causing this problem (is Word/Windows
98 corrupt?) or how I might solve it?

Thanks in advance!

 

[John]

Have you changed anything else, such as the font, font size or hyphenation?
Spaces will be introduced when Word tries to fully justify text. But you are
saying that the text is not justified at the right margin, only the left?
That is odd. Can you send a few pages of your document to me?

John

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This sounds to me suspiciously like document corruption; see
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm. OTOH, it's possible
that you just need to update your graphics driver.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Tom Calvert]

Have you changed anything else, such as the font, font size or hyphenation?
Spaces will be introduced when Word tries to fully justify text. But you are
saying that the text is not justified at the right margin, only the left?
That is odd. Can you send a few pages of your document to me?

I could do but I'm not sure it'd help as I've tried opening the file on
another computer and it works fine. On top of that, it's not just the one
file that's acting odd, but any Word file I open when Word is acting
strangely.

Spaces appear in the text but in random places, and they only 'appear' to be
there. As I scroll through the page the text sometimes jumps from properly
justified to 'left aligned with weird spacing'. Like I said it's really
hard to explain so I've put up a pic of the problem here:
http://www.photowalks.fsnet.co.uk/problem.gif - notice the lack of
justification and the weird spaces between words and even in the middle of
words.

I think it must be some kind of corruption of some sort but I don't know
what. I've tried mending my fonts folder, renaming normal.dot, reinstalled
Word, reinstalled Office, installed newer versions of Office, and even
installed the latest drivers for my graphics card. I'm beginning to think
it must be something to do with Windows (98) itself?

Thanks for your help!