A neatly formatted and composed text looks exactly first of all due to the fact that the distance between the words is approximately the same. It is due to this that the balance of “white and black” in the document is achieved. However, when aligning the text in width, it often forms so large distances between words that it looks “full of holes”. Voids can be noticeable by eye, and often the width of the gap in the Word is so wide that it interferes not only with aesthetic perception, but also with reading.
Possible Causes of Large Gaps
This is usually due to the fact that Word uses spaces as a reserve for line alignment.
There are other reasons. For example, between words there may be not one but two or more spaces.
How to deal with it? How to remove large gaps in Word? There are several ways to do this. The spaces between the words in Word can be aligned and the text more neat, and for this you need to know the reason for the appearance of "voids".
Hyphenation
The first way to remove large gaps in Word is to arrange hyphens. A program can distribute words inaccurately, leaving long voids between them, because for her this is the only way to align a line. So, you need to let her adjust the length of the words.
If your text does not have automatic hyphenation, activate this function. To do this, do the following. Go to the Page Layout tab. In it you need to find the button "hyphenation". (It’s located in the “Page Setup” section.) Click on it. In the drop-down list, check the box next to "Auto".
The program will arrange hyphens, the word length will be adjusted, and large spaces will disappear.
Extra spaces
As already mentioned, large gaps in the text of the Word may arise due to the fact that some of them are simply superfluous. To verify this, activate the "Display all characters" function. To do this, you can press the Ctrl and * keys. Space characters will be reflected as dots between words in the vertical center of the line. If they really repeat, double spaces need to be removed.
For these purposes, use the search and replace function.
Press the Ctrl and F keys. In the window that appears, select the “Replace” tab. In the Find box, type two spaces. In the line "Replace" - one. This way you can remove all double spaces automatically. Next, click the "Replace All" button. The program will report on the number of operations performed. However, this is not all. Indeed, initially in the text there can be not only double, but also triple, etc. spaces. Click "Replace All" again and wait for the program report. Repeat the procedure until the program tells you that it made 0 replacements.
Double spaces from the text are eliminated.
Reduce gaps in professional typesetting
A text editor, in principle, is not entirely designed for professional typesetting, but sometimes it is necessary that the text look neat, and the use of a special application is either redundant, or irrational, or it is simply not available.
In this case, the logical question arises of how to remove large gaps in the Word. Indeed, for professional typesetting, not only should the text be neatly formatted. For example, you need to compress a paragraph so that its last line in the form of one small word disappears.
In this and many other cases, the gap can be artificially reduced. To do this, you need the search function and the parameters of the Font window.
Select the text (for example, a paragraph) in which you want to reduce the spaces. Call up the search box. In the Find box, type a space. Click the "Find in" button and select "Current fragment" in the drop-down list. All spaces in your paragraph will be highlighted.
Call up the Font window (Ctrl and D), select the Interval tab and in the field of the same name select the Compressed option. It is recommended to reduce the size of the gap no more than to -0.4 (ideally, to -0.2). Click the OK button. All previously selected characters will be condensed, and the text will occupy less space. The size of the spaces is reduced.
Thus, there are at least three ways to fill in large gaps in Word. An alternative to all of them can sometimes be left or right alignment, but only if it is appropriate from the point of view of aesthetics and graphics of the text.