Excess space within columns

Avoid adding unnecessary space between sentences. Never enter two spaces following a period (or any other punctuation). Periods followed by two spaces were necessary in typewriter days, when every typewritten character was the same width (regardless whether it was an “i” or a “w”).

With today’s proportionally spaced characters (the letter “i” is much narrower than a “w”), only one space is necessary to make the punctuation stand out. Two spaces following a period creates distracting gaps between sentences. Often, these align with the gaps in adjacent lines, creating “rivers of white space”
running through your text.

Use your software program’s Edit>Find and Replace feature to locate every instance where two spaces follow each other, and replace them with a single space. Unwanted spaces are often inadvertently added during when moving text.

Likewise, never press the Enter or Return key twice at the end of a paragraph. This creates too much white space between paragraphs. In most cases, text looks best when paragraphs are separated by space equal one and one half lines of text. Use your software program’s Format>Paragraph>Space After… command to automatically insert the appropriate amount of space. An amount half the font size generally works
well.