Creative Tips 4: Things to Avoid!

We've established that spacing things out (as opposed to "spacing out") plays an important part in making your documents look good. Now let's look at some other topics.

There are some things that you should always avoid when working with a word processor. Some of these may be deeply ingrained. Some of them may invoke a cry of: "I've always done it that way and nobody ever complained!" All of them get in the way of creating a fully professional-looking presentation. We'll cover the first two in this issue.

[Full disclosure: I have a vested interest in this. These are all things that designers have to fix before typesetting a magazine story, product sell-sheet, book, brochure, or annual report. The more people who know this, the easier my life becomes!]

Just Say "No" to Blank Lines

Most companies today use a block style of layout in their communications: the first line of each paragraph is at the same margin as the rest, with no indent. But if you have no indented first line, you have to leave some empty space above it (or below the previous one) so the reader knows where a new paragraph begins, right?

Hands up all those who just hit "Return" or "Enter" twice to insert an extra blank line between paragraphs. Exactly.

There are two problems with that. In the first place, it leaves much too big a gap between the paragraphs: your message looks like disjointed islands of text. More to the point, if one of those extra blank lines ends up at the top of a page, it leaves a big, ugly gap. So let's look at a better way to do it.

Here is a bird's eye view of two pages. On the left is a typical page using the "double return" technique. On the right is the same text with a single return at the end of each paragraph, but with the paragraphs given a "space after" setting of one-half of the current leading (line spacing -- see Creative Tips #3). Notice how the example on the left looks disjointed.

In your word processing program, find the paragraph formatting section. (In Word 2003 and earlier, it's under the Format menu. Select "Paragraph".) You will see options for "Space Before" and "Space After," but you should use "Space After." This is because your word processor probably inserts "Space Before" even if the paragraph is at the top of a page. You want the first line of every page to begin in the same place, so avoid "Space Before."

Here is how you fix it.

This example shows the Paragraph format dialog from Microsoft Word. The text in this case is 12 point Bookman set on (not "in") 16 points of leading. Regular readers will remember these points from Creative Tips #1 and #3.

Hot tip: If you want to impress a graphic designer, casually mention: "Oh yes, I set my business letters in Bookman, 12 on 16, don't y'know." Look nonchalant as you say this.

 

The Space Bar: Between Words, Only

If there's one thing that will surely make a document look ugly, it's trying to line things up from one line to the next using spaces.

On a typewriter, all the letters, figures and punctuation occupy the same fixed width, so it's easy to line things up vertically. When you use a word processor and "proportional space" fonts, all that changes.

Not only do different letters, figures and punctuation marks have different widths, spaces are not all the same width. "What?" you say. "Five spaces on one line aren't the same as five spaces on the one below?" -- That's right! Worse, two bits of text might look like they line up on the screen, but your printer doesn't interpret letter spacing the same way your word processor does, so the printed version may be a mess.

Even on screen, you can see the difference if you look for it:

The same goes for indenting the first line of a paragraph: if you use spaces, those indents won't be exactly the same from one paragraph to the next. Your document will look subtly "wrong," even though most people won't be able to say exactly why.

The solution to this is the Tab key.

"Tab" is short for "Tabulator." On a typewriter, when you wanted to type out tabular information, like a balance sheet, you set little metal stops where you wanted things to line up. Pushing the "Tabulator" key sent the carriage rocketing to the next stop.

Computers inherited the old typewriter keyboard layout, and Tab came along for the ride. By default, your word processor puts an automatic tab stop every half inch. Notice that's "every half inch," not "every five characters." A tab stop will put your text at an exact place on the line, and, just like on a typewriter, you can set tabs anywhere you want.

Lets look at our example again, using a tab instead of spaces:

Everything lines up perfectly, just as it should.

Notice the small L-shaped mark in the ruler bar above the text (circled in red). That's a tab indicator, showing exactly where the tab stop is in the paragraph. To get the ruler bar visible in Word, choose Ruler from the View menu, or use the Help function in your program to find out how to display them. Click on the ruler to set a tab, drag the tab mark to position it where you want, or off the bar to remove it.

An extra benefit of using custom tab stops is that if, say, Jeff White resigned and was replaced by Joseph Livingstone, the word "Chairman" would not be pushed to the right. It would stay exactly where you placed it.

This Week's Bonus Tip

To center a headline, DON'T use spaces or tabs. Use the "Center Align" icon (it looks like centered text). In Word, hold down the Control key and press E, or the appropriate keyboard shortcut for your word processor.

See you next week!

Alan

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative is a design, photography and copy editing service located in Los Angeles County, California.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.