Home | Tips | Library | Other Authors | Other WP Sites | Writer's Links | Contact | Site Map | Donate

Macros, tips, and templates for Corel® WordPerfect® for Windows®
© Copyright 1996-2010 by Barry MacDonnell. All Rights Reserved.

How to double space text or add other custom line or paragraph spacing

Note The menu options discussed below are available on a WordPerfect menu. If you don't see them, right-click on the menu bar and choose a WP menu.

First, let's take a look at some commonly used terms, what they mean in WordPerfect, and how to use the features these terms reference.

This little bit of background information should help you apply double (or other) spacing effectively.

Line height and leading

Line height is the distance between the bottom (or baseline) of one line of text to the bottom of the next line. This is a measurement that is automatically set by WordPerfect for the size and type of the font in effect.

Essentially, WordPerfect determines what line height is needed to make a typical line of text optimally readable. Of course, this setting may not always be what is optimal or desirable in a given document or specific location.

Practically speaking, text should have enough leading (rhymes with wedding) -- or white space -- between the lines for that particular font and font size so that your eye can easily find its way to the next line in the paragraph.

Incidentally, many typography references suggest that the ideal line height for normal lines of less than about 65 characters and spaces is 1.2 times the height of the "m" character.

But again, WordPerfect takes care of this for you, and most of the time this works well. However, the longer the line -- especially if it is longer than about 70 characters -- the more leading should be used. Some use 1.3-1.5 times the normal line height, or even more, but you are the final judge of these things. How it looks -- and how easily it reads -- is the final test. Experiment to see what works best.

Here are some things to consider:

More leading is especially needed with any of these text types: fully justified, italicized, bold, all-cap, or text set in a script font or in reverse type (e.g., white on black).

Too little leading makes such lines more difficult to read than is the case with normal, left-justified ("flush left") text. Headlines, on the other hand, might actually require less leading.

To manually adjust line height to a preferred fixed (or minimum) amount, use one of the following two methods. Each method, or both, can be used on the same section of text, but you probably will tend to use just one of them in a document.

1. Format, Line, Height. You can set a fixed amount or a minimum amount.

Or use:

2. Format, Typesetting, Word/Letter Spacing, Adjust leading. A positive value increases the leading and a negative value decreases it.

These settings will take effect from the current cursor location, unless and until a new setting takes effect later in the document or until any newly inserted [Ln Height] or [Leading Adj] codes are deleted in Reveal Codes.

You can also change the line height and/or leading of just a selection of text. This is particularly useful for quotations and headlines.

Having read this far you might well ask: What does all this have to do with line spacing? How do I double space a document?

Line spacing

Line spacing in WordPerfect is simply a multiple of line height. When you increase line height for a given font and font size, you obviously increase the spacing (leading) between lines. (This is one reason why you might see the terms leading and line spacing used almost interchangeably in reference books.)

In WordPerfect you can set a this value very easily with the Line Spacing feature. It removes the small burden of calculating line height and/or leading when you simply need to double space or triple space a document (or set some other common fraction such as 1.5 space).

1. Click Format, Line, Line Spacing (or Format, Line Spacing in some earlier versions).

2. Type a value in the Spacing box.

For example, double spacing is simply achieved by setting the value to 2.0. This value tells WordPerfect to use twice the normal line height -- the value WordPerfect has automatically set for that font and font size (or to any custom value you may have set with the procedures above).

Most users probably will use line spacing rather than line height to achieve double or triple spacing (or some fraction of these), since, as noted, it does not require any extra calculations on your part. On the other hand, line height and/or leading might be more useful to "tweak" certain parts of a document, for the reasons given above.

Note that you can set line spacing for just a selection of text. If you do not select any text, then the new line spacing will take effect from that point onward (actually, from the beginning of the current paragraph onward) until it is reset or until the [Ln Spacing] code is deleted from Reveal Codes.

Putting more than one blank line between paragraphs

It is usually better to hit <Enter> just once between paragraphs that you have previously set up to use a more pleasing spacing between them (say, 1.5 lines), than to use <Enter><Enter> to add spacing between paragraphs. The latter typically produces too much inter-paragraph spacing, especially for typeset documents where such wider spacing tends to look amateurish.

To set automatic spacing between paragraphs (i.e., anything that ends with a hard return or other paragraph termination code, including outline styles), click Format, Paragraph, Format, then specify the number of lines or the distance in points you want between lines. (There are 72 points in 1 inch.)

That way, you need only press <Enter> once between each paragraph.

Examples

If line spacing is set at 1.0, specifying a 1.5 for "Number of lines" will automatically insert an extra half line between each paragraph of text when you terminate those paragraphs with the <Enter> key.

Setting this value to 2.0 will add an extra full line between paragraphs. However, this is not the same thing as "double spacing," which refers to adding extra space between all lines in the text, not just between individual paragraphs.

An additional benefit of using this feature is this: If you add, say, an extra half line between paragraphs, and then add double or triple spacing to the document, the paragraphs will be proportionally separated rather than have (in the case of using two or three presses of the <Enter> key) a huge white space between the paragraphs.

Tip

In the same Paragraph Format dialog box you can set the first line of the next paragraph to indent a given amount -- automatically -- when you hit <Enter>.

Some typography reference books suggest you do not indent five spaces, as once was the rule with typewriters. Rather, they recommend that you should set the indent to the width of an "m" character in typeset documents. As always, you should be the judge. (By default, WordPerfect uses a half inch -- generally the first tab stop -- regardless of the font size.)

The first paragraph on a page, or the first paragraph after a subheading, should not generally be indented. The reader has already been signaled that a new paragraph is about to begin, so indenting at those locations is redundant.

Using styles to set line height, leading, line spacing, or paragraph spacing

You can create custom styles that contain line height, leading, or line spacing codes. These can then be accessed as needed in any document from the Styles drop list on a property bar or from a toolbar. For more on this topic, see here.

For the current document, you can double-click the [Open Style: DocumentStyle] code at the very top of the document to open the Styles Editor for the current document and use the Editor's menu to set any of the items above. Or, you can use File, Document, Current Document Style to do the same thing.

Caution: Unless you really want the settings to take effect in every new document, do not enable the checkbox at the bottom of the Styles Editor, "Use as default." That checkbox will cause your settings to be included in the default template which spawns all new documents. Most likely you will not want to do that. (For more on the default template, see here.)

Shortcuts with your keyboard or toolbar

Starting with WordPerfect 10, several of these features were assigned directly to keystroke combinations on the default (WPWin) keyboard:

<Ctrl+1> = single spacing
<Ctrl+2> = double spacing
<Ctrl+5> = 1.5 spacing

These Format features are (not surprisingly) named Single Line Spacing, Double Line Spacing, and 1.5 Line Spacing, and are found under the Format category in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog (Tools, Settings, Customize, Keyboards tab, <select name>, Edit).

You can add these Line Spacing features to a custom keyboard definition of your own. You could also add Line Height and Line Spacing buttons to a toolbar or property bar.

See here for more on how to add WordPerfect features to keystroke combinations, and how to add buttons to a toolbar or property bar.