More Weirdness: One letter displayed per line!

[Complex]

This is why Discordians should not use computers. Pity we never
listen.

(Discordian using Word 98 under OS 9.1)

A large section of my document has... become messed up. Every letter
within this portion of the doc is displayed on its own line.
L
i
k
e

t
h
i
s
.

A paragraph mark is displayed on top of -- not beside, but on top of
-- each character. When you press delete, I'd expect the paragraph
mark to be deleted and the two characters to share the same line.
Instead, the previous character gets deleted, as if there is no
paragraph mark between them (and I guess there isn't).

(BTW, to see all this properly, I have to look at the doc at 500%
magnification. The paragraph marks obscure the characters they
overlay.)

I haven't been doing anything unusual with the doc. I've been copying
and pasting sections from other Word 98 documents, editing them,
deleting them, and replacing images.

Has anyone seen this before, and do you have anything to add before I
replace the section with the properly formatted text from a backup?

p.s. I haven't copied the whole doc except for the last Paragraph
mark. I'm about to, however! I procrastinated b/c my headings end up
displaying with the wrong indent distance (???), and I have to search
for the style & replace it with itself.

TIA,
complex

[Allen Watson]

in article 1ab3de0e.01110...@posting.google.com, Complex at
comple...@zaraTHUD.org wrote on 11/6/01 9:56 AM:

> This is why Discordians should not use computers. Pity we never
> listen.
>
> (Discordian using Word 98 under OS 9.1)
>
> A large section of my document has... become messed up. Every letter
> within this portion of the doc is displayed on its own line.
> L
> i
> k
> e
>
> t
> h
> i
> s
> .
>

<snip>

>
> Has anyone seen this before, and do you have anything to add before I
> replace the section with the properly formatted text from a backup?
>

I saw this a number of times when I imported docs from Word Perfect 5.1 for
Windows, with a bad translator! But I never saw it happen to an existing
Word doc.

> p.s. I haven't copied the whole doc except for the last Paragraph
> mark. I'm about to, however! I procrastinated b/c my headings end up
> displaying with the wrong indent distance (???), and I have to search
> for the style & replace it with itself.
>

That's what I would suggest: Copy the entire thing except the last paragraph
mark to a new document window. However, you should not need to
search/replace to fix your styles. Just open a document or template with the
good styles in it, let's suppose it is called "GoodOne". Then:

1. Go to the menu "Format->Styles".

2. At the bottom of the window that opens, click the "Organizer" button. A
new window will open.

3. In this new window, you can easily copy one, several, or all styles from
one document to another. Try it!

[ga...@ipillar.ca]

My son had the same thing happen on his project - It was an indent problem - Decrease indent and it will move each letter up a line. (CTRL & [ ) Keep decreasing indent until the document is normal. Easy Fix

[abna...@gmail.com]

In Word 2016, I had the same problem. I clicked the cells which were behaving correctly. Then go to Home tab > Paragraph section and click on bottom right corner button which opens Paragraph dialog. Click on "Indents and Spacing" tab. Note down the settings. Now click inside the screwed up cell and set the same values in the corresponding. For me these were the values for correct cell:
https://fud.community.services.support.microsoft.com/Fud/FileDownloadHandler.ashx?fid=4ab29b32-51ff-4ae8-9fcd-00c86ade92dc

[blueri...@gmail.com]

This is the one that worked for me.

[Olga Leonenko]

On Tuesday, November 6, 2001 at 12:56:28 PM UTC-5, Complex wrote:

I don't know WHY it happens, but it's 2023 and it still happened to me. Accidentally,
I found the way to fix it: click and un-click show/hide (Ctrl+*), and poof - all go back to normal.