(It can be a tedious job to fix each and every one!)Īfter you fix one paragraph, turn off the show/hide button, and review more pages until you find another errant paragraph with weird spacing. In our experience, those don’t need to be fixed. Now, some paragraphs in your book will have those empty zeroes and you won’t notice any spacing errors at all. After you remove all the odd characters from the line, your spacing between words will be even. To do that, simply put your cursor after the odd character, click your backspace key, and then click your space bar. You want to get rid of the odd characters and replace them with the plain black dot.

We occasionally see what appears to be a tiny, microscopic apostrophe, which causes problems, too. But, in some places, you will see the what look like empty circles. When you do this, you will be able to see the odd symbols that are causing the annoying spacing errors.īetween most words, you’ll see a plain black dot. This is necessary because the symbols are so tiny. Next, click the “View” option in MSWord and Zoom to 200%. You can also click View, and then see the Show/Hide option. Here is one example where the button looks like a paragraph symbol. Different versions of the program have different buttons/options for finding that option. There is a fix, however!įirst, in your document, go to the affected paragraph, and then click on the show/hide option in MSWord. The problem you’re describing is one we see on occasion. Copying and pasting text from one program to another (and even saving from an old version of a program to a newer one) always carries somewhat of a risk. The errors you’re seeing are being caused by something inserted by your version of MSWord, or perhaps even from a previous program. Luckily, many of these gremlins can be fixed with a little creativity. Can you help?Īfter formatting thousands of books for over the past 16 years, I’ve seen pretty much every bug MSWord can throw our way. Why are some of the spaces between words in my fully-justified manuscript uneven? There are normal spaces between most words, and weird, long spaces between others…on the same line of text! It doesn’t make any sense.

How to fix spacing in word on the side