Paragraph Justification anomaly on LAST line

[pgtr]

Paragraph Justification anomaly on LAST line

I've encountered this problem off and on for many years w/ MS Word.
Currently I have Word 2K on Win2K and it has struck yet again.

I occasionally have a paragraph that is 'justified' mess up the final
line. What happens is that even if there are only 2 words in the
paragraph the 2nd word is pushed all the way to the right side. Yet
the paragraphs immediately above and below it justify normally - that
is all the lines have a smooth right side margin but the last line
which simply is allowed to end 'wherever'.

It's a random occurance and once it starts on one paragraph, no amount
of fiddling, deleting, pasting etc will get rid of it - in fact the
more I fiddle the more likely the anomaly will spread to more and more
paragraphs! It's like one minute the paragraph is fine and then I type
in a new word or something and WHAM! the bottom line is all stretched
out...

I have had this occur randomly on various systems, various versions of
Word on various OS versions and w/ various printer drivers (which ARE
up to date) - it always comes back to Word being the common
denominator. I'd like to at last understand this annoyance and be able
to resolve it or have a workaround whenever it decides to randomly pop
up.

thanks!

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi Pgr

Paragraph Justification anomaly on LAST line

I've encountered this problem off and on for many years w/ MS Word.
Currently I have Word 2K on Win2K and it has struck yet again.

I occasionally have a paragraph that is 'justified' mess up the final
line. What happens is that even if there are only 2 words in the
paragraph the 2nd word is pushed all the way to the right side. Yet
the paragraphs immediately above and below it justify normally - that
is all the lines have a smooth right side margin but the last line
which simply is allowed to end 'wherever'.


It's a random occurance and once it starts on one paragraph, no amount
of fiddling, deleting, pasting etc will get rid of it - in fact the
more I fiddle the more likely the anomaly will spread to more and more
paragraphs! It's like one minute the paragraph is fine and then I type
in a new word or something and WHAM! the bottom line is all stretched
out...

I have had this occur randomly on various systems, various versions of
Word on various OS versions and w/ various printer drivers (which ARE
up to date) - it always comes back to Word being the common
denominator. I'd like to at last understand this annoyance and be able
to resolve it or have a workaround whenever it decides to randomly pop
up.

Are you positive that what you perceive to be one "whole" paragraph is
really a Word paragraph, IOW: Ending with a <return> and not a
<shift-return> (line break)? Word treats justified lines ending with
shift-return differently depending on one specific entry in Tools |
Options | Compatibility.

2cents
..bob
...Word-MVP

 

[pgtr]

Are you positive that what you perceive to be one "whole" paragraph is
really a Word paragraph, IOW: Ending with a <return> and not a
<shift-return> (line break)? Word treats justified lines ending with
shift-return differently depending on one specific entry in Tools |
Options | Compatibility.

Yes, absolutely positive.

Let's take a simple 5 para document w/ each paragraph being
'justified' for a smooth right margin. Just the middle paragraph (#3)
might display the anomaly.

Basically the last line might have as few as 2 words. The 2nd word
would be way over to the far right side w/ a massive gap measured not
in pixels but full inches!

Delete teh paragraph and try typing anew - the instant you hit the
space bar, the 2nd word typed in is all the way over to teh far far
right.

I've seen this (what I consider to be a bug) for many many years now
in various versons of word. Ever time I encounter it I keep asking
myself 'haven't they fixed that yet?' - well I finally decided to post
here and see if I might get to the bottom of understanding it and how
to work around it since it shows no sign of ever being fixed.

Currently the only possible workaround is to simply start a completely
new document from scratch. No amount of deleting or pasting seems to
resolve it and it only seems to get worse. I always dread encountering
this problem for this reason.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Make sure that it is just justified. If you accidentally press Ctrl+Shift+J
instead of Ctrl+J, you invoke the Distribute Paragraph command, which
force-justifies the last line as well as everything else.