Ellen is director of the MFA program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.
So if the per-line character count isn’t an adequate explanation, what is? For insight, I consulted Ellen Lupton. See if you agree with me: here is a two-column document with justified, one-inch-margin, 12-point Times New Roman text here is the same document with a ragged right margin. For one thing, I find text with justified margins annoying in word-processed documents even when the per-line character count is within recommended limits, as in a two-column document. That help wouldn’t be available when the margins are justified.īut I now think that’s an insufficient explanation for what makes justified text harder to read. I also thought that because of the high per-line character count, the eye relies that much more on a ragged right margin to help you not lose track of which line you’re on. The high per-line character count in contracts and other word-processed legal documents certainly makes them harder to read. (By the way, I’m not taking into account two-column documents: after flirting with a two-column format, I decided, with the help of some prodding by readers, that it wouldn’t be viable for contracts.) For example, Felici says that “the optimal line length is nine or ten words (figure an average of 5 1/2 characters a word),” in other words around 50 to 55 characters. That’s more than any recommended limits I’ve seen. (That’s the explanation I offer in MSCD 12.3.)Īn unjustified line of 12-point Times New Roman on letter-sized paper with one-inch margins (the standard setup at law firms) contains on average between 77 and 80 characters. I used to think that the problem was that by normal typographic standards, word-processed documents on letter-sized paper contain a relatively high number of characters. I’ve long wondered what renders justified harder to read. If you wish to do a quick readability test of your own, here is a document with justified, one-inch-margin, 12-point Times New Roman text here is the same document with a ragged right margin. This creates an irregular margin along the right side of the text column.Īlthough as a general matter I have no problem reading justified text, I dislike it intensely in word-processed documents, including contracts, because I find that it makes them much harder to read. On lines that do not fully fill the measure (nearly all of them), any leftover space is deposited along the right-hand margin. Ragged right A text margin treatment in which all lines begin hard against the left-hand margin but are allowed to end short of the right-hand margin. The conventional alternative is a ragged right margin. To achieve justified margins, a composition program must flex the spaces on a line, compressing them or expanding them. This creates straight, (usually) vertical margins on both left and right. Justified margins A text alignment in which the type in each line of a column completely fills the measure.
#How to change the right margin in word manual#
Here’s how James Felici, The Complete Manual of Typography (2003), defines “justified margins”: After setting all the desired values for all the margins, click the OK button to apply the margins.In most printed text that I read, whether in books, magazines, or newspapers, the margins are justified. Step 4 − If you are going to bind the document and want to add an extra amount of space on one edge for the binding, enter that amount in the Gutter text box, and select the side the gutter is on with the Gutter Position drop-down list. Select the Apply to: option to apply the margin on selected text or complete document. Step 3 − You will have to display a Page Dialog Box as shown below where you can set top, left, right and bottom margins under the Margins Tab. You can also select any of the predefined margins from the list, but using custom margins option you will have more control on all the settings. This will display a list of options to be selected but you have to click the Custom Margins option available at the bottom. Step 2 − Click the Page Layout tab, and click the Margins button in the Page Setup group. If you want the margins to be applied only to a selected part of a document, select that particular part.
Step 1 − Open the document the margins of which need to be set.
#How to change the right margin in word how to#
The following steps will help you understand how to set margins for an open document. In the screenshot given below, I have shown top, left and right margins, if you will type the complete page, word will leave 1-inch bottom margin as well. By default, Word sets all margins left, right, top, and bottom to 1 inch. You can adjust the right, left, top, and bottom margins of your document. Margins are the space between the edge of the paper and the text. In this chapter, we will discuss how to adjust page margins in Word 2010.
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