Wide spaces between words in justified text

[newthings]

Hi everyone,

I'm fairly new at using TextMaker.
I have an imported RTF document with justified text.
How do I reduce the gap between words?
Can this be fixed for the whole document like in MS Word?
This is a book and I have a lot of paragraphs.
Any help will be appreciated.

[Jossi]

The proper way to avoid wide gaps between words is to use hyphenation.

[G.R.H]

I don't know what your purpose for this text is, but I would nuke the entire document in Notepad, or your plain text editor of choice - mine is Notepad++. This will clear any corruption and codes from the previous application and leave you with a clean text file. You can then open/import this into a word-processor of choice for editing. If you are going to create a publication from this file, may I suggest Serif PagePlus X9, which can be had for around £20 from their website. It is probably the best DTP program available at the moment - unless you can afford Adobe InDesign. After editing, nuke again before importing into the DTP.

Hope that helps some.

[Jossi]

Without knowing anything about the intentions of the thread opener or the kind of document he has in his hands, I see no reason why he should take a double detour through a text editor. When you make all non-printable characters visible in TextMaker (Tools > Options, Tab "View"), you can do all the cleaning up directly in TextMaker. Likewise, while you need a DTP program for professional work, many people write complete book manuscripts with TextMaker and export them as PDF for printing. So we can't be sure if there is a need for using a DTP application here at all.

If the thread opener got a RTF document containing hard line breaks, they can be replaced by blanks directly in TextMaker, too.

[G.R.H]

I don't suppose you can. Once you have used a DTP you realise how limited a word-processor is - you don't have to be a professional to appreciate that. You also understand that word-processors can leave code in the text that is a pain when importing into a DTP. Opening your document in a text editor is hardly difficult or time consuming, and what little time - a few minutes - is more than made up for in not trying to figure out what is wrong with your text in the DTP.

People may write their books in Textmaker - nothing wrong with that and good luck to them. No-one is calling your baby ugly, but a DTP like Serif PagePlus X9 is far superior for text and file handling than any word-processor. The 'book-facility' is one such instance - whereby each chapter is stored as a separate file and concatenated by the book-facility at export time. This feature makes adding and deleting pages a breeze, and saves the attendant work created by the knock-on effect of doing so in a single large file.

[Jossi]

I'm the last one to deny that a DTP program is far superior to any word processor for professional and demanding typographical tasks - I have worked long enough with QuarkXPress to know that. Still I don't see the need for using an additional text editor. Can you give me an example for code that can not be cleaned up in TextMaker?