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
    2017-11-10T16:06:10+00:00

    There isn't a language option in the status bar.  But I selected the entire text and then found language under tools. I selected English (US), but it's still putting a space in after the apostrophe.  This is Microsoft Word 2011 for mac.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-10-17T13:36:14+00:00

    When I had this problem 2014, I checked and/or tried the suggestions. Nothing worked to resolve the issue. What did work is uninstalling Office 2007, rebooting and reinstalling Office 2007. I had to point to the documents the first time after the reinstall.

    It's been fine since then.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-10-12T22:20:03+00:00

    Hi Doug and thanks for the offer. I can't really send the document, unfortunately, because although the thing itself is in the public domain, my copy of it is subject to a non-disclosure agreement. Sounds silly, I know, but I hesitate to step out of line in that regard.

    I was so eager to try the font fix when I spotted it after posting my message that I did that without checking what font might be showing when the problem occurred. But I have copied the text from the PDF again into a new Word doc, where the problem does still occur, and I see that the font shown for the entire document - i.e. with no settings done by me - is TimesNewRoman (and lang = EN(CA)) ... and then when the apostrophe/quotation marks do their thing, that bit shows as Calibri (and lang = EN(US)).

    So in my case there doesn't seem to be any character-language setting intervening, and it's still a mystery why this happens (and why it switches languages to EN(US) when I type an apostrophe or quotation mark). I should also note that the apostrophe/quotation marks that get inserted are higher above the line of text than a superscript character is (but more or less normal size). If I set the entire doc to Calibri, the problem also disappears. So I suspect there is some weird intervening font there, I just can't see what it is.

    The clever people who figured out the font problem solved mine, though, in any case, whatever magic is involved.

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  4. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-10-12T21:42:40+00:00

    If you send me a copy of the document, referencing this thread in the covering email message, I will investigate the issue.

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