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#1
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Vertical ruler reacts oddly to dragging tabs and margins
When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at ..52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5". Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1. |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Vertical ruler reacts oddly to dragging tabs and margins
You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can
enter settings in the Tabs dialog. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "danhattan" wrote in message ... When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at .52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5". Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1. |
#3
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Vertical ruler reacts oddly to dragging tabs and margins
Thank you. That's a very useful function, though I still wonder why Word
wants to default to a location .02" off from where it logically should. But, now it no longer matters. Thanks again. "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can enter settings in the Tabs dialog. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "danhattan" wrote in message ... When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at .52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5". Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1. |
#4
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Vertical ruler reacts oddly to dragging tabs and margins
To some extent it depends on the grid interval you have set (in the Draw |
Grid dialog), but the fact is that recent versions of Word just don't set tabs very precisely. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "danhattan" wrote in message ... Thank you. That's a very useful function, though I still wonder why Word wants to default to a location .02" off from where it logically should. But, now it no longer matters. Thanks again. "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote: You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can enter settings in the Tabs dialog. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "danhattan" wrote in message ... When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at .52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5". Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1. |
#5
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Vertical ruler reacts oddly to dragging tabs and margins
On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 14:27:03 -0800, danhattan wrote: When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at .52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5". Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1. This is the result of multiple poor decisions in the design and implementation of Word. To fix it, set you measurement units to points, change the drawing grid to nine points, then set your measurement units back to inches. For the gory details, see below: You can set Word's default interface measurement units in Tools | Options | General. The choices are inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, and picas. No matter what unit you choose as the interface default, Word stores measurements as integer TWIPs. There are 1440 TWIPs per inch. Note that the user interface does not offer TWIPs as an entry possibility. You can enter TWIPs indirectly by remembering that one TWIP is .05 point. No matter what unit you choose as the interface default, you can enter measurements in any of the units by typing in the value and the unit abbreviation. (Font size is an exception; it is always specified in points (or half points) and it may be internally stored in that form.) Many measurements are typically specified in inches or centimeters, but can be set in points if desired. Margin sizes and tab positions are examples. There are 72 points per inch. There are 20 TWIPs per point. Whatever you enter will be converted to TWIPs by Word for storage. If the measurement that you enter does not happen to be an integer number of TWIPs, Word will round it to an integer. Most of the common fractional inch settings will convert to integer TWIPs exactly. The fact that measurements are stored as integer TWIPs means that you cannot set measurements more precisely than one TWIP, i.e. about .0007 inch or about .0017639 centimeter. This is close enough for practical purposes, but can be disconcerting when Word gives you 6.4999mm instead of 6.5mm. Word rounds measurements to two decimal places for display purposes. (It ignores the setting for decimal places in Windows Regional Settings.) For example, if you enter a value of .125 inches, Word will convert it to 180 TWIPs and store it exactly. If you open the dialog box again, you will see the number displayed as .13 inches, which can be disconcerting but is harmless in itself. But it gets worse. If you now click OK on that dialog, either because you have a bad habit of using OK instead of Cancel or because you have changed some other value in the dialog, Word will see the .13 inch value and convert it to 187 TWIPs and store the new value! I know of only two ways to avoid this bug. One is to always re-enter correct values in all measurements whenever you are going to click OK on a dialog box. The other is to set the default measurement unit to points, because two decimal places of points are enough to specify TWIPs exactly. (The third approach is to relax and not let errors of .005 inches bother you too much.) Things are even worse when setting the Drawing Grid. In this case Word rounds on input instead of on output, so you cannot manually set the correct value of one eighth of an inch! The only way to set the correct drawing grid is to change your measurement unit to points and set the grid for nine points. This bug is particularly insidious if you accidentally end up with the Drawing Grid set to .13" instead of .125", because from then on your ruler settings will snap to strange values like .52". The error is cyclic; it is zero at 0", 3.25", and so on, and maximum halfway between. |
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