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Formatting paragraphs question

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The Bass Bagwhan:
Hi everyone, when you justify a paragraph sometimes you get these odd lines that have large spaces between the words, kind of stretched out, because of the words in that particular line.
Someone has pointed out that professionally formatted books usually don't have this problem.
Is there a fine-tuning trick in formatting the paragraph to achieve this? I'm using the latest Word.

Thanks!

R. C.:
I presume from the question you are using full justification to "Evenly distribute your text evenly between the margins."  Also, I suspect you are using a monospaced typeface (font), which will exacerbate the problem.

The short answer is it is almost impossible to get MS Word to evenly space words in full justification. I did find an article here that claims to allow you to alter spacing for words within a line. Essentially, the "solution" recommends changing the spacing for specific words in a line.
 
Sadly, when this happens to me, I rewrite the sentences until they achieve my preferred aesthetic.

R.C.

Bill Hiatt:
I haven't tried Amazon's and D2D's formatting, but I know with Vellum, it converts the material so that the spacing is even without having to do all kinds of acrobatics to get there.

Also, I just checked. I have Word set for justified when I'm composing, and if a line is very short, Word doesn't try to spread it out. Are you perhaps using an old version? I think 2021 is the last standalone version. Office 365 doesn't display a version number.

RiverRun:
I think what you need is called kerning, which is changing the spaces between characters. I googled it and found this.


--- Quote ---Kern the characters that are above a particular size

Kerning refers to the way spacing between two specific characters is adjusted. The idea is to give a better looking result by reducing the spacing between characters that fit together nicely (such as "A" and "V") and increasing the spacing between characters that don't.
--- End quote ---

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-spaces-between-text-e9b96011-1c42-45c0-ad8f-e8a6e4a33462

I've always been a little fuzzy on this myself and don't usually bother about it. But I know it's a thing. Maybe the link above will help you get started.

Bill Hiatt:
Yes, kerning is one of the things that can be manually addressed.

As I recall though, it is a very time-consuming process. That's where formatting programs come in.

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