h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi!! Does anyone know if there's a way that I can force Word to keep part of a sentence on one line... It's for a Physics essay (that needs to be in Friday!)

ie, so that it prints

... 2.09 +/ 0.05 g m-1

not

... 2.09 +/ 0.05
g m-1

???????

Thanks!

You can create a 'hard space' that doesn't break where the program wants to create a line-break by pressing control+shift+spacebar. If you press the button on your toolbar that looks like a paragraph marker, the hard space will look like a degree-of-temperature sign.

You can get the same symbol using menus by choosing insert, symbol, special character.

You can change the justification or the paragraph markings for just that line, or change the font size for a few of your characters.

You can create them as a bitmap using another program and paste them in as if they were an image, but this becomes problematical if it doesn't land exactly where you want it when you anchor your object in.

I am thinking you can get a superscript/subscript for your negative exponent by control+bracket+number you want.

you can also add super script by highlighting the character and pressing ctrl+shift+= and subscript by ctrl+=

The simplest way(I think!) is to start your "sentence" at the beginning of a line (hard Return immediately before it)and widen the margins for that line if you need to. Another hard Return immediately after it will of course will start the subsequent text on another new line.

That's what I'd do anyway!

Alternatively you could stick it in a text box, click on View|Toolbars|Drawing and it is there.

Select the text in that you want to be in one line, then go to

Format > Font > Character Spacing,
select *Condensed* from the drop down menu
and try 0.1pt (the default setting is probably 0.5pt),
if 0.1pt isn't enough, try 0.2pt etc.

*Condensing* simply reduces the amount of white space inbetween charatcers and is a reasonably subtle way (visually at least) of squeezing just a bit more into one line



Or... (IF your paragraph spacing is set to zero, otherwise what follows could open up a whole new can o'worms )

Select the text, go to Table > Convert > Text to Table,
set *Number of columns* to 1,
set Autofit behaviour as *Autofit to contents*
set *Sepatate text at* as Tabs
Click OK
Then go back to the Table menu > Table AutoFormat and
set *Formats* to *none*
Then drag the right edge of your window until all the text is on one line
As you are trying to squueze in just 2 charcters (in superscript) its highly unlikely that this will *push* the text out the acceptable margins imposed by a printer...

The more I think about it, the better the character spacing option seems

Or even just reduce the fontsize, I currently do all my tables in Arial 10 (with the bulk text in Time New Roman 12) it helps people skip past the bits they aren't interested in (if the equation is amongst text) or allows people to focus in on the factual sections easily.

Thanks, Sea Change! Ctrl+Shift+Space is exactly what I wanted!!

A bit of fiddling shows NastyKoala is correct about sub/super. I learned something new from six7! I will try to see if that helps, sometimes.

If there's lots of equations and things, I'd use LaTeX over M$ W*rd any day of the year...

I know how to use Sub/Super script... The line I gave in the original post was just an example of 'something split over two lines', I wasn't trying to be *that* specific... But thanks all for your help