Paragraph spacing, indents and borders in Write by Zaweba

Paragraphs carry more of a document's look than the words inside them. The gap between them, how far they sit from the margin and how tightly the lines are packed decide whether a page feels airy or cramped. Write by Zaweba keeps all of that in the Paragraph dialog, with the common settings also on the toolbar.

Alignment and indents

Alignment sets how lines meet the margins. Left aligned text, ragged on the right, is the easiest to read for letters, essays and reports. Centred suits titles and short lines on an invitation. Right alignment is handy for an address or date at the top of a letter, and justified text gives the straight edges you see in books and newspaper columns.

Indents move a paragraph in from the margin. Increase and decrease indent nudge it in steps, which is the quick way to set off a long quotation. A hanging indent leaves the first line at the margin and pulls the rest of the lines in, the layout used for bibliographies and reference lists so each entry's first word stands out.

Spacing that does the work for you

Spacing before and after a paragraph is the tidy way to separate them. Many people press Enter twice between paragraphs, which leaves empty paragraphs scattered through the document. They break up awkwardly at the foot of a page and make later changes fiddly. Setting a gap after each paragraph gives the same look, and it stays consistent everywhere.

Headings usually want more space before than after, so they sit close to the text they introduce. A quick check is to look at a page from a distance: if a heading seems to float between two sections, give it more space above and less below.

Line spacing sets the distance between lines within a paragraph. The presets are 1.0, 1.08, 1.15, 1.5 and 2.0, and you can type a custom value. Single spacing suits dense material and tables. The values just above single are comfortable for everyday letters and reports. Schools and universities often ask for 1.5 or double spacing so tutors have room to read and mark, so check the guidance before you hand in an essay.

Borders and shading

A paragraph can have a border and a background shade. Used well, this picks out a note, a warning or a summary box without needing a table. A light grey shade behind a short paragraph of key dates on a club newsletter, or a thin border round the terms at the bottom of an invoice letter, makes them easy to find.

Keep it restrained. A border on every other paragraph makes a page look busy, and dark shading behind dark text is hard to read on paper. Pale shades and thin lines print well and still do their job.

Making it consistent

Formatting each paragraph by hand is fine for a one-page letter. For anything longer, set spacing and indents in a style, so every body paragraph or every heading picks them up together. Change the style and the whole document follows.

The format painter in the Edit menu copies paragraph formatting as well as character formatting, which is useful when one paragraph is already right and you want another to match. If a pasted paragraph has brought strange indents with it, Format > Clear formatting removes the direct formatting so it falls back to the style.

When spacing looks wrong and you can't see why, switch on formatting marks with Ctrl+Shift+8. Paragraph marks show where each paragraph really ends, so stray empty paragraphs and unexpected breaks are easy to spot and remove. The marks appear only on screen, never on paper or in a PDF.

Good paragraph formatting is the sort of thing readers never notice. They just find the document easy to read, which is exactly the point.