Extra space after apostrophe

Anonymous
2010-07-19T19:31:29+00:00

Every time I type an apostrophe " ' " Word adds an extra space before the next letter.

For example, If I type don't, Word makes it come out Don' t 

Needless to say, this is annoying.  Does anyone have an idea how to make this problem go away?

Thnx

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2010-07-20T08:14:10+00:00

Hi RER

This sounds to me as if the language formatting may be set to something other than English. French, perhaps? Some languages require spaces before or after punctuation, so Word does this for the user. Which can be annoying if you aren't actually typing in that language.

At the bottom of the Word status bar you may see a little box with the language. If you don't right-click the status bar (that's the bar across the bottom of the Word windows,  in case you're not familiar with the term) and choose "Language" from the context menu. This will tell you the language formatting of the selected text.

If the text in the document is not an English "dialect", and you want the entire document to be in English, press Ctrl+A to select the document. Click on this "Language" button in the status bar, then select the language you want to use from the dialog box that pops up.

Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-05-20T21:56:08+00:00

    I had a similar issue.  However my language was set to ENGLISH.

    If you highlight you document (CTRL A), choose Times New Roman, or a font your computer has installed, it will go away.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-02-09T18:25:40+00:00

    This was helpful, though my solution was a little different. For some reason, when applying an em dash character, it changed my font to "em dash"??? I never realized this, as everything else, i.e., all the characters, looked like Times New Roman, which was what my document was written in. So I simply selected all and changed the font back to Times New Roman and it fixed the problem. Crazy issue, but easy fix (when you know what to do).

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-02-01T21:41:55+00:00

    I have this same problem, but only using rotated text. If I use an apostrophe, Word automatically makes the spacing between the apostrophe and the next character extremely wide (about the width of a double space). When the text is horizontal, the spacing issue goes away, but if I rotate 90 degrees (the way I want it), the wide spacing appears. Of course I could use straight quotes instead as a workaround, but that's not what I want. Seems like a bug to me.

    I'm using Word 2013, font is TNR (although problem remains if I change font to Arial or Calibri or anything else), and language is set to U.S. English.

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-10-12T09:23:38+00:00

    You are correct if you change the font of your document to the ones available in your microsoft word's font options then this extra space problem goes away. language has got nothing to do with this problem thanks a lot for this man.

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