I HAVE been using WordPerfect 5.1 for writing letters and documents on a personal computer. I find that sometimes the spaces between words are not evenly proportioned in some lines.
Is there something I am doing wrong with the program, or is it just this particular software? When I receive letters from, for example, my solicitor, the text looks perfectly spaced.
If it is the software, then could you suggest another word-processing program which has a nicer presentation. I use a Star NX-2415 24-pin printer. JOHN RHODES San Po Kong Word processors tend to produce the spaced-out effect you describe when you use perfect justification with them. This is when the ends of the lines are perfectly aligned with each other.
Unless a program is smart enough to hyphenate most words well, it will simply push a difficult word over from a line and stretch that line out (or justify it).
Programs for newspaper editing are good examples of this. Atex, the program the South China Morning Post uses (the XyWrite word processor is based on it and even has the same simple commands), is one. Although proofreaders keep a keen eye for ''bad spacing'', it does occur occasionally.
The same is true of other word processors. To correctly space justified text, you have to do the same thing newspaper proofreaders do - go through the text and insert hyphens yourself in words at the beginning of a line following one with bad spacing in it.
Or, you could take the easy way out and simply get the word processor to set all text to the left. That way, the text will be aligned on the left of the page, and ragged (or uneven) on the right. All words will be perfectly spaced, though.