Spacing
Julie Worth said:
If that works, it’s by accident. Setting the exact spacing to 25 sets it to 25pts, not 25 lines per page (e.g., 30 pts gives you less than 25 lines per page, and 20 pts gives more). Not every font will give you 25 lines that way. And better to do that with the style, rather than selecting all. Select FORMAT/STYLE/normal/MODIFY/PARAGRAPH, and then set the spacing.
Well, according to Microsoft, that's how you're supposed to do it, and that's how I was taught in two MS Office courses.
But, no, it wont work with every font, and on some word processors, it won't work with Dark Courier, but with MS Word it should work with all three fonts, and it's no coincidence. You aren't supposed to be using every font, you're supposed to be using Courier 12, or Times New Roman 12, and getting 25 lines this way with these fonts is deliberate programming
What happens at 20pts or 30pts has nothing to do with what happens at 25pts. What happens at twenty-five pts happens for a specific reason.
For maybe 100 years, Pica was the font of choice. Then came Courier 12 and Times. Courier 12 is usually the same size as Pica, which is also no coincidence. These are now the two fonts publishers nearly always expect writers to use, and these are the two fonts that word processors have been built around for many, many years, and the two fonts that MS Word is still built around.
For roughly the same century or so, publishers also expected writers to have twenty-five lines per page.
So 25pts was set as the spacing that gives twenty-five lines per page with these two fonts. No coincidence at all. The scale goes up or down from there, just as zero degrees is set as the freezing point of water on a celsius thermometer. These pts aren't there because someone just decided to program them in on a slow day. Every point number sets a specific number of lines for a specific font, but they're designed for Times and Courier 12. 25pts sets twenty-five lines per page because that's what publishers have always wanted, along with either Courier 12 or Times 12. Deliberate programming, not an accident or coincidence.
This is far and away the easiest, fastest way of getting exactly twenty-five lines per page, if you're using a font you should be using.
If a writer is messing aroud with some weird or unusual font because they like the way it "looks," then, no, this method may not work. But a writer doing this is asking for a swift kick, anyway, and who cares what line numbers they get?
But whatever font you're using, it pays to learn how the font and pts interact. Learning just what these pts do with the font you use makes everything a heck of a lot easier and faster than screwing around with styles and format. That's why they're in the word processor.
