Word 2016 For Professionals For Dummies. Dan Gookin

or expands the space character to help fill text on a line. The effect of using spaces is uneven text because the width of the space characters is inconsistent.

      ❯❯ You don’t need to type two spaces after the period in a sentence. This rule was developed for typewriters because their monospaced typeface was more readable when two equal-width spaces were appended to a sentence. In fact, if you use a monospace font in Word, you can still use two spaces at the end of a sentence. For all other (proportionally spaced) fonts, one space is good.

Understanding tab stops

      A tab stop is a gizmo that sits at a specific horizontal position in a paragraph. It sets the width of a tab character typed at a position before the tab stop. The tab character becomes a wide space that moves text over the tab stop.

      The reason the tab stop concept is difficult to understand is that almost every character you type in a document has a given width. Most people assume that the tab works just like those other characters – for instance, that the tab character is ½-inch wide. Instead, the tab character is as wide as the distance between the insertion pointer’s position and the location of the next tab stop.

      Figure 3-1 illustrates the basic tab-stop / tab-character concept. In the figure, after the word Tab, the Tab key is pressed. A variable-size character is inserted, extending to the next tab stop.