I am compiling a manuscript as a .doc document and a few paragraphs come out with very flawed spacing in the last line where there may only be 4 or 5 words, but they are stretched across the page to the right margin. I only see this on a couple of pages, and it cannot be corrected in the text program I use.
Thanks for any clues.
“doc” format is a proprietary binary format by Microsoft Word. DOCX is the current format. What “text program” are you using to attempt to repair the DOC file? Are you sure it is capable of editing binary DOC files?
Exporting to RTF, then using Word to covert to DOC or DOCX normally works best with problems like this.
This does not sound to me like a flawed document, but rather a case of full justification being used without any kind of optimisation. Scrivener itself doesn’t handle most of that to be clear, it only supports very basic formatting. You will need at least a word processor to make things look decent. You would be at the least looking for settings to change how the last line of a justified paragraph is handled, so that it is left aligned (LibreOffice refers to this as “Start”). Adjusting hyphenation settings, and making sure the language is properly set in the document, will also be critical for justification to work properly.
That said, as noted above there is little reason to be using .doc in 2024, so I’d double-check that you really can’t use .docx, and whether the justification settings are not better from a start with .rtf or .docx.
Thanks Amber,
My mistake, it is a .docx file compiled out of Scrivener and I am using Open Office Writer to look at it. Writer does not allow me to correct the problem.
I am downloading Libre Office to try that.
Okay, I don’t know my way around OO as well as LibreOffice, but they should be pretty similar. You’d be looking for the paragraph formatting window to test the setting, this window should have an Alignment tab in it. Here’s what it looks like in LibreOffice:
I also highlighted the “Text Flow” tab, which is where hyphenation settings can be found.
Now in both cases the best way to do this is of course with styles rather than on the paragraphs themselves, but just testing things out with the paragraph formatting palette will at least let you know if that’s the right direction to solving a problem, and if it is only a few paragraphs, and you don’t intend to recompile any time soon, it might be easiest to just fix them rather than go down the route of making sure the output from Scrivener is styled well and so on. That’s a level of overhead that is better for frequent revisions.
Amber,
I downloaded and installed LibreOffice Writer and the .docx file out of Scrivener opened with no problems. LO is now my default App instead of OO.
Many thanks to you.
John
Glad it was an easy fix! I guess OO has a bad default for paragraphs that don’t stipulate extra options for justification. LibreOffice is a good fork in my experience, it is routinely updated and has some very interesting features for document design if that’s your sort of thing.
