user manual

36Word

Special charactersSpecial characters

Special characters

You can insert foreign and other special characters in your file by

selecting the Special character command from the Insert

menu.

You can also insert non-printing characters which control word

wrapping on the screen and in the printed document:

• For a non-breaking space, press Shift and the Spacebar. This

will prevent a line breaking at the space.

• For a non-breaking hyphen or “hard hyphen”, press Ctrl

with the - key. This will prevent a line breaking at the

hyphen.

You can use the View preferences command on the Tools

menu to select which non-printing characters are displayed on

screen.

Line spacingLine spacing

Line spacing

When you select a particular font size, Word automatically uses

an appropriate line spacing to make sure that there will always

be a gap between successive lines of text. You might sometimes

wish to override these settings, e.g. in a paragraph with different

sizes of text.

••

• To set line spacing: select the command from the

Paragraph menu and enter a point size. Set the spacing to

‘At least’ to ensure that lines of text never overlap, but will

move further apart to accommodate any larger text

appearing on the same line, or ‘Exactly’ to ensure that lines

of text are always the same distance apart, even if larger

text appears on the same line.

• To insert extra blank space between paragraphs, enter point

sizes for the ‘Space above’ and ‘Space below’.

Note: The other lines in this dialog affect where page breaks

occur when the file is printed. See ‘How the page looks’ later.

aragraph bordersaragraph borders

aragraph borders

You can draw a border around a paragraph. You can also change

the background colour of a paragraph.

• To draw a border: select the paragraph(s) then tap

and select from the range of options. Or, use the command

on the Paragraph menu to apply the borders and set the

style and colour for each “side” of the border (i.e. Left,

Right, Top or Bottom) and how far you want the border to

be from the text. You can also set a background colour.

• Remember to set different background and text colours,

otherwise the text will be invisible.