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Word processing for law firms: Exploring inner (document) space: understanding line and paragraph spacing
| 15 November 2010
One of the issues that arises repeatedly among my training clients has to do with an aspect of word processing that many people commonly think of as relatively simple: line spacing. At first glance, it seems like a straightforward feature. After all, everyone intuitively understands the concepts of single spacing and double spacing.
But for members of the legal profession, even this basic, everyday feature can be complicated. For one thing, people who work with pleading paper derived from MS Word’s Pleading Wizard frequently find that the text in the body of their document doesn’t align with the pleading line numbers at the left margin of the paper.
This problem usually occurs because they have applied standard single and double spacing to the text, unaware that the line numbers do not use standard single or double spacing, but instead use “Exact” line spacing based on points.
As I’ll explain shortly, there is a complex relationship between points and standard line spacing. Before going into the details, I want to explore the differences between line spacing and paragraph spacing, a related topic that many users find confusing.
The article uses many examples, download the .doc version here.
