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Books, Productivity, and Design

Word Tips

How to Remove Blank Space Between Words in Justified Paragraphs

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Sometimes you may see too much space between the words, after you justify your paragraph text.

This doesn’t look good while self-publishing an eBook, printed book, or simply any article or report. Here’s how to get rid of those gaps within your paragraphs. 

Actually, there are two ways to remove those wide gaps. 

1. The first method is to use Hyphenation settings in your document.  Watch the video clip above for a demo of how to do everything we discuss in this guide post.

Click on the Layout tab group, select Hyphenation drop-down to choose Automatic or Manual. The gaps automatically correct itself by adding hyphens to the broken words, thus removing the gaps between the words. Doing this manually would mean, it asks you for every hyphenated word whether you want to keep it or not. 

2. The second method is to use ‘Kerning for fonts‘. It’s the spacing between the characters, and this spacing is mostly different for every font face we use.

You can get to the Font kerning settings by clicking on the tiny arrow to open the Font settings dialog box, then click on the Advanced tab – and then select the check box. Then play around with the scale, spacing settings by testing various points here to see which works best in your situation.

NEVER do this as a default setting for the entire document, this is only for specific instances where you see abnormally wide gaps. 

Additionally, you can also enable the setting from File – Options – Advanced – “Don’t expand character spaces on a line that ends with SHIFT + RETURN“.

Once done, it auto-adjusts the spacing for the last line in your paragraph. This setting will also apply to your entire document. 

To conclude,

  • Remember that a paragraph that has not been hyphenated is much easier to read.
  • Hyphenate only when text is trapped in columns or in other narrow places, or when you want a very formal-looking document. Otherwise, follow the second method. 

I hope you liked or learned something from this post. Thanks for reading, and you take care!

How to Start a Page Number from a Specific Page in Word

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In today’s blog post, we will see how to start a page number from a specific page, like the Chapter 1 or any Front Matter section like the Foreword section.

Thus, by simply following the steps given in this article, you can make Page numbers for your paperback books look professional.



Pagination for PaperBacks

The secret to adding page numbers starting at first page for your first chapter is in using ‘Section breaks’. You might have used page breaks to separate different portions of your front pages and all the different chapters.

However, if you want to see different stylings for your page numbers, then go for Section breaks instead of Page breaks.

To organize what we learn, I have divided this instruction into three different categories:

  1. Creating sections
  2. Adding & formatting page numbers
  3. Deleting page numbers

Watch this on YouTube

If you don’t have time to read this blog post, simply watch this on YouTube here:

Creating sections

First and foremost, for the page numbers to be customized the way you want it to be, you need to create ‘Section breaks’ between different sections of your book – like the pages within the usual Front matter (copyrights, foreword, introduction, dedications), Chapters 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Page breaks won’t be helpful when it comes to creating page numbers in our footers. To create a ‘Section break’, just go to the Layout tab, click on Breaks and choose ‘Next Page‘ under the Section Breaks.

section breaks

Create a ‘section break’ in between all your different sections and move to the next step.

Adding & formatting page numbers

First double-click on your footer section of the page where you want to add the page number.

Once you double-click, the Header & Footer tools tab gets activated with its Design tab shown.




Now, click on ‘Page Number‘ and select ‘Bottom of Page‘ (you can choose whichever position you prefer here) and add page number.

add page numbers in footer

Formatting page numbers

Then, click again on the ‘Page Number‘ and select ‘Format Page Numbers…‘ and choose a Number format from the first drop-down option given. If you’d wanted to select ‘Roman Numerals‘ for your Front Matter section, this is the time to choose them !!

Format page numbers in Word

Additionally, if you want to customize the ‘starting’ page number for your chapter, you can change the number to start at a different number from the ‘Start at:‘ counter.

customize page numbers in word

Deleting page numbers from the first page of a new chapter

Professional editors choose not to show page numbers on the first page of a new chapter. You can also do that by simply selecting this checkbox which says ‘Different First Page‘.




 

different first page in word document

This is how you add a different starting page number for your first chapter.

Here’s a question for you: what’s the real challenge in self-publishing your first book, in case you haven’t created any yet?

Let me know in the comments below and I will see if I can help you in any way through a video or a blog post or just directly answering your questions.




How to Type in Indian Languages in a Word Document

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Now that Google input tools for Windows is gone, how do we type in Indic languages in a Word document?

Fortunately, there is a workaround!




We use the Google Input Tools for Chrome extension to do that!

Here’s how:

  • Simply create (or use your existing) a Live account with Word online here: https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx (opens in a new tab!)
  • Once you are in, you will see that, you could either start from a new Word doc or simply upload your existing document by clicking on this button here:

tada1
Click to see a larger image

  • Once done, we can now use the Google Input Tools extension within Chrome (install from here). All you have to do is to simply activate the extension, and type the Indic word in English and the words pop up on the screen.

Use Google Input tools in Word document

 

Here’s a sample:

tada3

Bonus tip

You can even assign keyboard shortcuts to switch between English and other Indic languages. Click on the extension, and click on ‘Keyboard Shortcut Settings’ to map your shortcuts.

google input tools keyboard shortcut settings

Customize your keyboard shortcuts here:

tada4

CAUTION

After downloading the file from Word Online, your INDIC texts could be a set of square boxes like this:

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In case you see jumbled and funny characters like the ones above, simply select the text and change to any font (preferably to the Indian Language font that you are familiar with).

Hope you now got an idea of how to make use of the Google input tools to continue writing in Indian languages within Word documents!

 

How to Embed Custom Fonts Within Word Document

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Sometimes we use a fancy and stylish font to create our ebook or word document that looks great on our computer.

But when we send this document to a friend, they don’t see the font style but a regular font staring at them.

This happens because the stylish font we used to type our document is installed only on our computer and our friend hasn’t installed it.



To resolve this issue we need to EMBED that stylish or a different font WITHIN our Word Document.

Here’s how to Embed Fonts into a Word Document

We must first know the font-face name that we’ve used so that it can be embedded into our Word Document.

If you don’t have the font file, download it from the internet – sites like dafont.com has plenty to choose from.

Just remember to use the free ones and not the copyrighted ones. The below video will walk you through the process in detail. Please comment below if this helped you.