Getting a SINGLE-line paragraph to justify (on both left and right)
OK, back in the Olden Days I tried to get Microsoft Word, AppleWorks, and/or MacWrite to do this and I failed. Will Pages be any better?
When a paragraph using the Justify option is being typed, its text starts out being left aligned. As soon as there's enough text to wrap to a second line, the first line is justified on left and right. This is, of course, exactly what Justify is supposed to do. The incomplete last line of the text is left aligned until it, too, becomes not the last line of the paragraph any more.
Here's my question: If I have a paragraph with not enough text to wrap to the second line, can I force Pages to justify the line anyway? Of course, if there are few words in the line, justification might look stupid, but if there's not too much space, it'll look fine.
PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME TO JUSTIFY (in the judicial sense!) WHY I WANT TO DO THIS. I know most (all?) word processors don't do this; I know that one or two of them do (possibly only ultra-expensive programs used by publishers to actually format real books). I know I'm not "supposed" to want this. BUT I DO.
Sigh; OK, I'll explain why. Maybe I'm a poet and I like the way it looks. Maybe I'm trying to create the look of a particular book's page that, in the original, continues on the next page and thus has its first line (the last line of the previous page) justified both left and right. Maybe I'm just weird.
I know I'm not the only person who wants this; the only other Discussion I can find on this topic has a sentence that reads:
"It is only text flowing past the column width that causes the previous line's text to be justified (if indeed that formatting is selected). Therefore, as I understand it, there will always be un-justified text at the end of a paragraph and/or last column."
Attempts to work around the problem:
(1) If I try typing shift-return at the end of a line, I start a new line with a Line Break, but the previous line pops back to being left aligned.
(2) Various other modifier-key combinations insert new paragraphs.
(3) If I type an option-space as the last word, it behaves disconcertingly like an ordinary space. (Not quite, but I thought option-spaces were supposed to act like normal, non-space characters, as they do in the ol' standby AppleWorks.) But in particular, the fake, invisible "word" does not wrap to the next line and does not trigger justification of the line I'm trying to justify.
The only workaround that kinda sorta works is this:
(4) Type a word at the end of the last line that is long enough to wrap to the next line and thus to cause the previous line to justify. Select that extra word and change its color to white.
Ugh. And there are situations in which this workaround can't be used, and then?
Is there any way to do what I want in Pages? How about any other Mac word processor? (I've tried Word and AppleWorks, obviously.) With Apple's recent attention to typographic detail (such as the floating Font window's Typography options), wouldn't it be trivial to add this justify-one-line-on-both-ends option in some Inspector panel or other?
When a paragraph using the Justify option is being typed, its text starts out being left aligned. As soon as there's enough text to wrap to a second line, the first line is justified on left and right. This is, of course, exactly what Justify is supposed to do. The incomplete last line of the text is left aligned until it, too, becomes not the last line of the paragraph any more.
Here's my question: If I have a paragraph with not enough text to wrap to the second line, can I force Pages to justify the line anyway? Of course, if there are few words in the line, justification might look stupid, but if there's not too much space, it'll look fine.
PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME TO JUSTIFY (in the judicial sense!) WHY I WANT TO DO THIS. I know most (all?) word processors don't do this; I know that one or two of them do (possibly only ultra-expensive programs used by publishers to actually format real books). I know I'm not "supposed" to want this. BUT I DO.
Sigh; OK, I'll explain why. Maybe I'm a poet and I like the way it looks. Maybe I'm trying to create the look of a particular book's page that, in the original, continues on the next page and thus has its first line (the last line of the previous page) justified both left and right. Maybe I'm just weird.
I know I'm not the only person who wants this; the only other Discussion I can find on this topic has a sentence that reads:
"It is only text flowing past the column width that causes the previous line's text to be justified (if indeed that formatting is selected). Therefore, as I understand it, there will always be un-justified text at the end of a paragraph and/or last column."
Attempts to work around the problem:
(1) If I try typing shift-return at the end of a line, I start a new line with a Line Break, but the previous line pops back to being left aligned.
(2) Various other modifier-key combinations insert new paragraphs.
(3) If I type an option-space as the last word, it behaves disconcertingly like an ordinary space. (Not quite, but I thought option-spaces were supposed to act like normal, non-space characters, as they do in the ol' standby AppleWorks.) But in particular, the fake, invisible "word" does not wrap to the next line and does not trigger justification of the line I'm trying to justify.
The only workaround that kinda sorta works is this:
(4) Type a word at the end of the last line that is long enough to wrap to the next line and thus to cause the previous line to justify. Select that extra word and change its color to white.
Ugh. And there are situations in which this workaround can't be used, and then?
Is there any way to do what I want in Pages? How about any other Mac word processor? (I've tried Word and AppleWorks, obviously.) With Apple's recent attention to typographic detail (such as the floating Font window's Typography options), wouldn't it be trivial to add this justify-one-line-on-both-ends option in some Inspector panel or other?
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
