Line spacing problem

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I need help with a Word problem, please. I’m using Word 2000 in Office 2000, but I have to reason to believe that the same problem exists in later versions of Word.

I’m Editor-in-Chief of an international scientific publication. Quite commonly, I will receive a Word document, most usually from an Asian country, in which the leading (the spacing between lines) is significantly greater that the standard single line spacing in the American version of Word. To be specific, I often receive Word documents from countries outside the US in which the font is Times New Roman, 12 pt, with Paragraph spacing Before and After set to 0 pt and Line spacing set to single, but in which the actual line spacing (the leading) is a significant fraction of a point larger than for the same text with the same settings in a US version of Word. As noted, this seems to happen most often with documents from Asian countries. I have tried changing all of the settings I can find to get the leading to match the US leading, without success. I have found only two ways I can get the leading to be set back to the US Word leading. The first is to save the Word document as text (e.g., MS-DOS text), and then import it back into a new Word document and reapply all of the formatting (which, for a document with a lot of equations and formatting, is a real pain!). The second method is to copy “chunks” of text from the foreign Word document into a new US Word document, being careful not to copy too much (less than a page long seems to be the maximum that works) and being careful not to copy the space (and thus the hidden formatting information) at the end of the last paragraph (copying too much or copying that hidden formatting information will cause the wider leading to show up in the new document). Unfortunately, this second method doesn’t always work. No amount of changing styles; nor any of the options I’ve tried under Tools…Options…Compatibility; nor any of the options under Format…Font or Format…paragraph seem to have any effect on this.

I have observed the increased leading coming from countries using the Asian versions of Word, but generally not from European or Middle Eastern versions. My conjecture is that the default for single space in Times New Roman in the Asian version of Word involves larger leading than for the US version of Word. Regardless, I can’t seem to find any way of correcting the problem. I would greatly appreciate any help or suggestions. Thank you!

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If you set the paragraph line spacing to “exactly” say 12 points, instead of single spacing, does that work for you?
Are you seeing this problem in every line? Or just the lines wth equations and super or subscripts?
J. Till

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Can you post a sample document that demonstrates the problem? Remove any personal or company specific information in the document before you post it.

What happens if you select all and change the font to something other than Times New Roman? What happens if you select all and press Ctrl-Space and Ctrl-Q. I assume the text is not in a table cell (in which case the table style settings can override the style settings).

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You are right, it does have to do with Asian fonts. Because I haven’t had that problem for a long time, my memory is faint. I think you have to disable Asian fonts in the font dialog. (If they aren’t already enabled, you won’t see the choice to disable them.) Perhaps someone with more experience can answer better.

Pam

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I wonder if enabling Asian fonts, opening and saving the document, then doing the reverse will switch off the change in leading.

From your description, the hidden trigger must be in the end of section breaks and/or end of document (final) paragraph marks. If we could download a two section example doc it may help.

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I’ve just thought…

Under Compatibility options, there is a setting ‘Don’t add leading (extra space) between rows of text’. There’s also some other ‘Asian’ rules regarding line breaks and leading. Just maybe one of them may resolve the problem?

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You might get some useful information from this site:

Word features for East Asian languages – Word – Microsoft Office Online

Pam

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I appreciate everyone’s thoughts. I’ve appended an example document, containing a single paragraph with the problem I’m describing, to this post. I’ll try to answer the questions raised so far:

1. Yes, the problem is seen in every line. Setting the paragraph line spacing to an “exact” value would remove the problem. However, the text often contains inline equations and other items that require automatic adjustment of the leading, so that isn’t a desirable solution.

2. Changing the font doesn’t affect the leading. Selecting all, pressing CTL-Space and CTL-Q doesn’t change it, either. No, the text is not in a table cell.

3. Two responders talked about enabling and disabling Asian fonts. How is that done, please?

4. Checking “Don’t add leading (extra space) between rows of text” under Tools…Options…Compatibility doesn’t fix the problem.

Again, I really appreciate your help!

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2. Changing the font doesn’t affect the leading. Selecting all, pressing CTL-Space and CTL-Q doesn’t change it, either. No, the text is not in a table cell.

When I check the Normal style I see this —

Normal
Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 10.5 pt, (Asian) Chinese (PRC), (Other) English (U.S.), Justified, Line spacing: single

— but no obvious way to edit out “(Asian) Chinese (PRC)”. I saved as RTF and looked at the tags, and there do appear to be a lot of Far East-related tags. However, I don’t know whether any simple Find-and-Replace operations (viewing the RTF file as plain text) will strip those out.

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Jscher2000, I really appreciate this information. What version of Word are you using? When I look under Format…Styles at the Normal style in the Example.doc in Word 2000, I do not see the information about “(Asian) Chinese (PRC)” (the rest of the entry is the same as you have – and the 10.5 pt is puzzling, because Word thinks it is 12 pt). This certainly does suggest that my guess about there being a different version of the Times New Roman font involved might be correct. However, it can’t be quite that simple, because changing the font (to another font on my computer, which should be a Western version of the font) doesn’t change the leading. Assuming you’re using a later version of Word, could you please try such a change, and see if the leading changes under your version?

I wonder if the “single” setting for Line Spacing under Format…Paragraph is somehow being affected by the information that an Asian version of the font was involved?

I must admit that I’m getting pretty desperate about this problem. It has cost me untold tens of hours of grief over the years. It used to be tolerable, because I wasn’t receiving that many papers with the problem. However, the number of contributions from Asia has increased significantly (which is great), and most of them have this problem (which isn’t so great).

In looking back through the replies so far, I noted that two posters (Pam Caswell and Terry Farrell) suggested possibly disabling Asian fonts. How is that done, please? I couldn’t find any reference to this in Word Help.

I really appreciate everyone’s help. Thank you.

Ross

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Jscher2000, I really appreciate this information. What version of Word are you using? When I look under Format…Styles at the Normal style in the Example.doc in Word 2000, I do not see the information about “(Asian) Chinese (PRC)” (the rest of the entry is the same as you have – and the 10.5 pt is puzzling, because Word thinks it is 12 pt).

I think I was using Word 2003 when I viewed the document. Although direct formatting of 12pt had been applied to the text, the style definition, according to Word 2003, was set to 10.5pts.

The suggestion above to override the normal style in the document using the Organizer to copy it from another template or document may raise the question: where is the Organizer? If you can’t find it elsewhere, try the Macros dialog. Then click over from the Macros tab to the Styles tab.

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I have been exploring your sample file and can see how annoying this can be for you. I have also experimented in trying to remove the Asian language setting from the text but discovered that a one line macro can be used to remove the line spacing issue independent of the Language setting. In Word 2010 Beta the following line works to get the same spacing as other non-tainted documents.

Code:

ActiveDocument.Styles("Normal").ParagraphFormat.DisableLineHeightGrid = True

If you used this, would you still need to remove the Asian font setting from the style?

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That works for me too. Just open the document, select Alt+F11 and copy the VBA into the Immediate Windows (use Ctrl+G if you cannot see the Immediate Windows) and press Enter.

This is really a weird bug!

I also suggest that you remove the direct formatting (Ctrl+Spacebar) and apply normal style again (presuming that it is set for TNR 12pt on your PC).

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Andrew, Terry: THANK YOU! The VBA command you suggested did indeed restore the “normal, non-Asian” line spacing in Word 2000 for the document! That’s the first progress that has been made on this problem in the several years over which I’ve been searching for a solution!

However, when I then copy my Normal style into the document, the greater spacing returns. I even tried applying the VBA command, saving the document, closing Word, reopening Word and the document, and then applying Normal (which is set to TNR, 12 pt (English, US)). Part of the strangeness is that the Normal in the original document (with the wider spacing) is set to 10.5 pt, even though the font shows up as 12 pt when you select it and look at the setting under Font. I can probably work around not being able to apply the style I want, but I wonder if you have any ideas on how to solve this added bit of strangeness.

Thanks again!

Ross

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Andrew, Terry: THANK YOU! The VBA command you suggested did indeed restore the “normal, non-Asian” line spacing in Word 2000 for the document! That’s the first progress that has been made on this problem in the several years over which I’ve been searching for a solution!

However, when I then copy my Normal style into the document, the greater spacing returns. I even tried applying the VBA command, saving the document, closing Word, reopening Word and the document, and then applying Normal (which is set to TNR, 12 pt (English, US)). Part of the strangeness is that the Normal in the original document (with the wider spacing) is set to 10.5 pt, even though the font shows up as 12 pt when you select it and look at the setting under Font. I can probably work around not being able to apply the style I want, but I wonder if you have any ideas on how to solve this added bit of strangeness.

Thanks again!

Ross

I suspected that that would happen. Remember, the Asian font is specified in the normal for that document. Even the clear all formatting, supposedly leaving only plain text, of W2010 doesn’t clear the Asian font or language. But I think I found something that does. I used the organizer to overwrite the normal paragraph style in the document with one from my normal.dot (m). I suspect any clean normal style would do. Changing normal did not change the grid, so I ran the macro as well.

Between the two you should be good to go.

Pam

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Good to hear we have made some progress. The following code is much more heavy duty than the test one liner and should be much more effective on your entire document. Note that you may need to re-run it anytime you import or copy content and/or styles from other documents.

Code:

Sub temp1()
  Dim aSty As Style, aPara As Paragraph
  For Each aSty In ActiveDocument.Styles
    If aSty.Type = wdStyleTypeParagraph Then
      aSty.ParagraphFormat.DisableLineHeightGrid = True
    End If
  Next aSty
  For Each aPara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
    aPara.Format.DisableLineHeightGrid = True
  Next aPara
End Sub

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Thanks, Jefferson. I couldn’t remember where it was in W2000.

Pam

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Dear Friends,

Thank you – again – for all of this. This really does seem to work. Andrew, thanks for the more robust version, as well.

If no one has any objection, I will probably publish a summary of all of this – along with both bits of VB code – in my Magazine. There are a number of engineers who are faced with this problem, and I’m sure they will be glad to find a solution. I’ll of course give credit, and point people to the Windows Secrets Lounge as a resource.

Thanks again for your help. Best wishes.

Ross

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Sorry, I didn’t see this until the newsletter came out.
I believe the problem is that text that is copied into a Word document will only accept the font of that document if the font of the original document exists on your computer. I suppose it has to know what it was originally to change it to something else.
Anyway, you might try this as a solution to your problem (it might be a little easier than using the macro). I have tried it with your sample text and it works.
Copy the text you want.
Before pasting it into a new document, type a character, e.g. ‘q’, or even a space, into that new document. Then paste in the text you copied.
I believe this forces Word to adopt the style you have already placed in the document by typing the initial character.

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Try this, select the paragraph with line spacing issue and Format > Paragraph and uncheck the Snap to grid when document grid is defined option.

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Jolas

That appears to be the relevant setting you have in your Paragraph dialog and it sheds a light on where the problem can be resolved on computers that have enabled Asian typography. The original poster’s problem is that this particular setting is not available on machines that have disabled Asian Typography. Microsoft Word doesn’t give us non-asian speakers any visual clue that this setting even exists – I had to dig through the vba intellisense to stumble upon it.

The macro provided earlier in the thread is the equivalent to turning this setting off for every paragraph style in the document and every paragraph in the document (thus overriding any local paragraph formatting with this setting).

Thanks for pointing out where the setting can be found – it will serve as an important clue for others searching to resolve the same problem.

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Jolas, Andrew – Thank you for shedding light on the “snap to grid” issue.

Geoff: You are right: this does work! I tried it on another article I received from an Asian source today, and typing a character before selecting and pasting the whole Asian document into the new document did indeed remove the extra leading. Thank you!

I really appreciate everyone’s help on this. As I indicated above, it’s been a vexing problem for a number of years.

Ross

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I found that I could not open a Word document in Word 2002 without seeing only gibberish. When I used Open Office it was able to open the file just fine. I then saved the file as .doc and Word could then access it correctly.

It is worth a test to see if it works for your own problems. Open Office is free and can be useful at times.
Mary

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Mary:

Thanks for the suggestion. However, working with technical material for engineers and radio scientists, almost all of the material I deal with has very large numbers of equations (either display equations, or inline equations or symbols that have to be entered as equations). By far the best way to do this (for many reasons) is MathType (or the stripped-down version of MathType, called Equation Editor 3.0, which Microsoft includes with Word). To the best of my knowledge, Open Office and MathType don’t work together.

The very good news is that the solutions proposed above by Andrew and Jolas do work very well!

Ross

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I still use Office 2000, running under Vista Home Premium. I couldn’t find a way to reset anything that affected the line spacing. I didn’t find a “snap-to-grid” setting, perhaps I just missed it.

I found that I had the problem when I opened Word by clicking “Open” from the linked file here. I couldn’t fix that file by ordinary means.

However, I noticed two large contributors to the visual impact of the problem. One, of course, was that the document, as presented, included its own margin settings, which are for a much narrower text than I mostly use (0.5″ margins left and right). However, another biggie was that the linked document was set to 125% zoom . This, of course, aggravates the problem. Finally, the impact of whatever is causing the problem does appear to be screwing up what’s meant by “Single spacing”: When I pasted the text into a new document, with Arial 12 pt and single spacing, and compared that to the downloaded document, it appeared that “my” single spacing was quite close to two points of leading above the 12 point type, while the downloaded document had about three points of leading. Setting spacing in the downloading document to “Exactly 14 points” forced it to be almost indistinguishable from my 12 point document in line spacing.

However, when I opened a brand new file in Word, selected the contents of the already opened, but unmodified, “defective” file, and pasted it into the new “virgin” file, it seemed to be properly formatted. What may have resolved it, because I checked with and without doing this, was to insert a few Returns (Paragraph Marks) into the blank new document and then paste the copied text in the middle of those. I didn’t do an exhaustive test to determine whether it mattered where among them I pasted (beginning, middle, or end), or whether the number of Returns mattered. It might be that a blank document is “ripe for piracy” and inserting anything at all “locks” that out, but I didn’t pursue that further. (I have, however, noticed a similar effect when editing posts on forums that allow various styles (bold, italic, etc.). Starting a new line, jumping somewhere else to fix something, and then coming back to type in the still blank line often loses the ongoing formatting at that point, but typing even a single character locks it in.)

I thought it might have something to do with Styles, but deleting all of the input document’s styles that I could delete, and then using Style Organizer to copy my own Styles to replace them, was of no effect.

So I couldn’t diagnose it, I couldn’t fix the underlying cause it, but I could easily sidestep the problem. It would be interesting to hear if that works on other versions of Word.

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