Hi,



When we receive documents for editing, they have some styles. We override them with our own custom styles but every now and again (depends on the client) this does not work; the line/paragraph spacing is wrong and is ignoring what is set in our styles.

If I highlight all text and 'clear formatting' this does not work either; when I set our styles after this it's still wrong.

Does it exist that the document itself can have a base style, and everything else is inherited from that. What I mean is if the document is set to exactly 10pt line spacing, and one of our styles is set to 22pt, does it become 32pt?

This means line numbering is totally messed up. Our industry charges per page for submitted documents so this is absolutely critical.

The ONLY way I have found to fix this is by copy/pasting as text only into a new document, then setting styles from there (which I why I asked about a document base style). This works 100% of the time, but it loses tables, formulas etc. so we end up basically having to re-style the whole thing bits at a time. These documents can and regularly do exceed 100's of pages.

I need to be able to delete all formatting from the original at the document level, not at the highlighted text level.

The example on the left is the original (wrong), and the right is the copy/pasted as text only (right). You can see the line spacing after paragraph mark, and generally between lines, is bigger on the left document, despite both documents using exactly the same style.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Attached Images

word-error.png (297.4 KB, 23 views)

These are the results of Ctrl + A > Clear formatting. Still different, so something must be outside of the text.

Attached Images

word-error-clear.png (296.7 KB, 23 views)

Try Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Spacebar.


I do not know that this will help but it might.


The spacing can be caused by the font, and by paragraph formatting. It can also be caused by page alignment but this is rare. A document will have a set of default fonts which are a part of the Theme. Default Paragraph Font Explained


When you are applying your styles, how are you doing that?


The only way I know to delete all formatting in imported text is to paste as text only. There is no such thing as deleting all formatting at the document level.

Thanks Charles. I'll give those a go. Is there a way of pasting as values/text but keeping tables?

An update. I have the original document as it came in to us. Digging a little deeper shows some Asian ancestry, which I have since read can cause these types of issues. It probably went through a translator to hit the EU market before arriving to us. The Normal style is set to BetangChe but the document arrived to us as Arial 12, so somebody's done Ctrl+A > change font.

Attached Images

word-error-2.png (52.2 KB, 22 views)

If I do that sequence it resets it all to the normal style. If I then amend the normal style to be Arial 10, 0 pt before/after spacing and single line space, the preview looks good but the document doesn't actually end up matching the preview.

Attached Images

word-error-3.PNG (87.3 KB, 22 views)

EDIT: If I highlight some text and do right click > Paragraph, the settings do not match the style that I have just reset everything to:

Attached Images

word-error-4.png (54.0 KB, 22 views)

PS: How we apply styles. We have two:

Ctrl + A > clear formatting
Highlight what we want to change > select style from the Styles group in the ribbon
Highlight the heading parts > select header style from the Styles group in the ribbon

When you import text into a document and the text uses styles that have not been used previously in the document you will import the style definition with the text.


AFAIK, the Clear Formatting button is the equivalent of pressing Ctrl+Spacebar but is not the equivalent of pressing Ctrl+Spacebar and Ctrl+Q.


Try updating/keeping styles by importing them from your own template using the Organizer.
http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide....htm#Organizer


BTW: I haven't read your other posts with images yet. I will. They are very hard for me to read because of the size of the images. I can either have very small text or having the text scroll off the screen to the right destroying continuity in reading.
This is what I see:

Do not apply paragraph styles to a single paragraph by selecting text. If the style is a linked style rather than a paragraph style you will not apply the paragraph formatting but only the text formatting.


I keep linked styles disabled. Heading styles are linked by default.



Otherwise, simply click in a paragraph and do not select text. If you select an entire paragraph (including the final paragraph mark) and apply a linked style you will get the paragraph formatting.

I would start with the Default Paragraph Font Explained.
Make sure that the defaults for your document are what you expect. I believe these can be controlled in the document theme. (This means it is an informed guess.)


See http://wordfaqs.ssbarnhill.com/Custo...alTemplate.htm. If you think I am confused about this, you are right.

If you paste as plain text you lose the table structure. However, if you then select that text you may be able to convert it back to a table.


This process of directly changing the font rather than going through the style is likely a part of your problem.

Thanks for all the replies.

This is basically what we (try to) do. The problem is these documents are hundreds of pages, hundreds of paragraphs so it's not feasible to click individual paragraphs. If they were authored 'properly', we could do 'select with similar formatting', but they aren't, so can't

I agree that all the manual changes (line spacing, font etc.) are a part of the problem. We have no control over the authoring of them so just need the shortest path to fix them. It probably gets updated by 2 or 3 different places before we see it.

Another update: our non-heading style is set to 'at least 22pt' line spacing. This is the problem. Well it's not a problem in a 'clean' document, but the ones we get in it is causing the 'extra' spacing. If I change it to 'exactly 22pt' it looks exactly like a clean one set that is set to 'at least'. The problem here is that we sometimes have inline images that can be taller than 22pt, so they get clipped when set to 'exactly'. That is what we went with 'at least'.

I don't think there's a simple solution.

I agree no simple solutions. One technical jargon note when seeking further help, I suspect that by "non-heading style" you may mean body style.

Cross-posted at: https://social.technet.microsoft.com...ing?forum=word



For cross-posting etiquette, please read: http://www.excelguru.ca/content.php?184

I would be looking at the document compatibility and layout options. If you go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to bottom and verify both docs have exactly the same Layout options and Compatibility options.

The compatibility options won't be visible unless the document is saved in compatibility mode but there are settings there that do exhibit the spacing behaviour you are demonstrating. eg Suppress extra line spacing the way WordPerfect 5.x does

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia