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#1
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Gutters. What's the point?
Some features seem to persist from version to version of Word. One such
"feature" is the ability to set gutters for a document on the Page Setup, Margins tab. As I understand it this option is there as a quick fix for users who decide to bind their document and find that they haven't allowed enough space in the margin to handle the dead space which the binding method creates. However, has anyone tried using this feature in practice? I created a document with a left, right, top and bottom margin of 2.5cm. I also created a header and specified it should start 1cm from the top of the page. I then decided to add a gutter of 0.5cm to the left of the page. This resulted in an effective left margin of 3cm. So far so good, although I'm not sure why you can't just increase the value of the left margin itself to 3cm? Both the header and the body text observed this change. I then decided to change the gutter so that it appeared at the top of the page instead. The body text dutifully moved down the page by 0.5cm. However the header stayed at its specified position of 1cm from the top of the page. Doesn't this behaviour mean that top gutters are pointless if you have documents with headers? If the option to set gutter and gutter position didn't exist would we actually lose any flexibility? Can't the same thing be achieved by simply changing the margins and the start position of the header? As a general point adding a gutter to a document after it has been formated is not necessarily a good idea since it reduces the amount of space available for text and can therefore completely ruin the layout of the document. I looked through quite a few books on Word before posting this question, but none of them gave an example of where using gutters would be a good idea. Does anyone here use gutters and if so did they solve a problem which couldn't have been tackled in any other way? I would venture that most people leave the gutter value at 0cm, so I'm curious as to why it persists between versions. Hopefully someone on this board will be able to defend its inclusion. Regards, J. |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Gutters. What's the point?
I am entirely with you. I always figured the gutter setting was a crutch for
people whose arithmetic skills are so poor that they can't add the desired gutter to their Left or Inside margin. One instance where it does become useful is described at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...etPrinting.htm. In this case, the article was greatly simplified when it occurred to me to tell people just to set an Inside gutter equal to half the page width and then set margins as desired. Many users seemed to have a conceptual problem visualizing the desired result and figuring out how to add half the page width to the desired page margin to get the resulting Inside margin for the sheet. Wrt a gutter at the top, the header issue hadn't occurred to me (since I've never tried this), but a common problem is that there's no way to set an appropriate gutter for landscape pages in a predominantly portrait document (if you set the gutter to Left or Inside, you get it at the side of the portrait pages instead of the top or bottom). The workaround here is to use "Different odd and even" header/footer and add Space Before to the header on odd pages and Space After to the footer on even pages to create the gutter. -- 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. "John" wrote in message ... Some features seem to persist from version to version of Word. One such "feature" is the ability to set gutters for a document on the Page Setup, Margins tab. As I understand it this option is there as a quick fix for users who decide to bind their document and find that they haven't allowed enough space in the margin to handle the dead space which the binding method creates. However, has anyone tried using this feature in practice? I created a document with a left, right, top and bottom margin of 2.5cm. I also created a header and specified it should start 1cm from the top of the page. I then decided to add a gutter of 0.5cm to the left of the page. This resulted in an effective left margin of 3cm. So far so good, although I'm not sure why you can't just increase the value of the left margin itself to 3cm? Both the header and the body text observed this change. I then decided to change the gutter so that it appeared at the top of the page instead. The body text dutifully moved down the page by 0.5cm. However the header stayed at its specified position of 1cm from the top of the page. Doesn't this behaviour mean that top gutters are pointless if you have documents with headers? If the option to set gutter and gutter position didn't exist would we actually lose any flexibility? Can't the same thing be achieved by simply changing the margins and the start position of the header? As a general point adding a gutter to a document after it has been formated is not necessarily a good idea since it reduces the amount of space available for text and can therefore completely ruin the layout of the document. I looked through quite a few books on Word before posting this question, but none of them gave an example of where using gutters would be a good idea. Does anyone here use gutters and if so did they solve a problem which couldn't have been tackled in any other way? I would venture that most people leave the gutter value at 0cm, so I'm curious as to why it persists between versions. Hopefully someone on this board will be able to defend its inclusion. Regards, J. |
#3
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Gutters. What's the point?
Thanks for the great reply Suzanne. You certainly know your stuff.
As much as I like Word I still don't think it's a match for the old Ventura Publisher program I used to use about 12 years ago (particularly where more complicated documents are concerned). It's both a shame and surprising that Word hasn't caught up with these old desktop publishing programs yet. I still find the Word interface unnecessarily cluttered and it can sometimes be very difficult to place items exactly on the page where you want them to be, since Word always seems to assume it knows best. I'm still not convinced by the ribbon interface either. It may be great for users who don't want to learn the program properly but I find it quite slow when you want to take control and define elements yourself rather than just using all the pre-defined stuff. Thanks for taking the time to reply. |
#4
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Gutters. What's the point?
Well, Word is not and has never pretended to be a desktop publishing
application (Publisher fills that slot in the Microsoft Office lineup, to the extent that anything does). It is a word processing program, pure and simple. Although it has many features that make it superior to some DTP apps for specific jobs (such as long documents with footnotes/endnotes, TOCs, indexes, etc.), its graphics handling and page layout capabilities will never rival PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, QuarkXpress, Adobe InDesign, etc. -- 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. "John" wrote in message news Thanks for the great reply Suzanne. You certainly know your stuff. As much as I like Word I still don't think it's a match for the old Ventura Publisher program I used to use about 12 years ago (particularly where more complicated documents are concerned). It's both a shame and surprising that Word hasn't caught up with these old desktop publishing programs yet. I still find the Word interface unnecessarily cluttered and it can sometimes be very difficult to place items exactly on the page where you want them to be, since Word always seems to assume it knows best. I'm still not convinced by the ribbon interface either. It may be great for users who don't want to learn the program properly but I find it quite slow when you want to take control and define elements yourself rather than just using all the pre-defined stuff. Thanks for taking the time to reply. |
#5
Posted to microsoft.public.word.pagelayout
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Gutters. What's the point?
Sorry to hijack your thread a little, but I used to think that Word was
pretty amazing. It's not a desktop publishing tool, but it's darned near everything else for everyone else. I used to be able to defend Word for tech pubs on the strength of two arguments: It's ubiquitous and eternal. It's fully extensible. Now it looks like MS has neatly lopped off my second argument. Sigh. Bear -- Windows XP, Word 2000 |
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