Whenever I look at a Word document and it’s all screwy, the first thing I want to see is what doesn’t show up on the screen: Those tiny characters that affect the text in strange ways, but which are hidden. Somewhere in that mess is the solution to the formatting problem.
A word processing document is a complex thing. A lot is going on, way more than just the fancy preview you see and edit. Even at the basic level, characters such as Enter and Tab affect the way the text looks — but you can’t see them! That is, unless you use the Show/Hide command.
The Show/Hide command is found on the Home tab, in the Paragraph group. Its button sports the paragraph symbol, ¶.
When Show/Hide is active, you see items in the text that normally don’t show up. Specific items to look for are:
| Symbol | Character | Description |
|---|---|---|
| • | Space | These symbols represent the space characters in the text. |
| → | Tab | These symbols represent Tab characters, which push text over to the next tab stop. |
| ¶ | Paragraph | These symbols represent the Enter characters, which end a paragraph of text. |
| ↵ | Soft Return | These symbols represent soft returns, created by pressing Shift+Enter. |
The key to using Show/Hide is to scope out your text formatting and layout for any of those symbols.
For example, if you see that a paragraph is formatted oddly, look for a ↵ symbol, which means a rogue soft return may be lurking in the paragraph.
I routinely scope out double dots and double tabs. That means that the text is probably in need of some formatting.
For example, seeing something like:
•••••This•text•doesn't•line•up.
Those spaces at the start of the line should be replaced by a tab stop and a single Tab character. Likewise:
→→→Why•is•this•line•indented•oddly?
Three tabs in a row? Until you have a multi-columned list and two columns are blank, I see no reason to have so many tabs in a row. Create a single tab stop where you need it, then use one tab. Otherwise the paragraph will look funky on the page, especially if you edit it or reformat the entire document.
Word’s Show/Hide command is good, but sadly it isn’t on a par with the old WordPerfect Reveal Codes. Man, I loved that command. With a press of a function key (was it F3?) the WordPerfect window split and you could see all the document codes in a preview window. If anything was screwed up, you could edit your document on a molecular level and fix it up.
One last thing: Remember to turn off Show/Hide when you’re done! Click the ¶ button again. Otherwise those dots and jots in your text can drive you nuts!
Have you ever tried Latex? It would be nice if there was a unified text formatting language and I think Latex would be the best bet for such a thing. The problem is I havent found any good graphical editor for creating Latex documents yet.
Comment by BradC — February 25, 2013 @ 3:07 pm
I’ve played with Latex like a zillion years ago. I was intrigued!
Comment by admin — February 25, 2013 @ 3:54 pm