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How do I set a Microsoft Word document to be exactly 25 lines per page?

Do you have any idea how to set a document in Microsoft Word to have exactly 25 lines per page? That's what the agents and publishers I'm approaching want as a standard format, (1" margins and 25 lines) but every attempt I've made to do that has fallen short one way or another -- the occasional 24 or 26 lines. Any ideas? I've queried a lot of my other writer friends, but their solutions don't quite work. They may not be Mac folks. Help! If you don't have an answer I'm going to be doing a lot of line counting and eyeballing of pages.

Dave's Answer:

An interesting question and one whose answer is more subtle than it may initially seem. I asked my friend Allan Wyatt, author of my favorite Microsoft Word Tips newsletter, for his assistance. Here's what he shared with me:

"It is probably because he has orphan/widow control turned on for the paragraph styles he is using. Turn it off, and it should be fine."

Before I show you how to do that, however, let's look at how to set a document to have 25 lines per page. It's ridiculously complex, sorry to say. Here's what Allan explains:

"There is no setting where you indicate "number of lines per page" because most places never worry about that anymore. Instead, you have to calculate it.

Start your font size. (A fairly standard font is 10-point, so I will use that in the following calculations.)

If you display the Indents and Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box (Format | Paragraph), the Line Spacing should be set to "Single." This allows Word to calculate a normal line spacing, which typographically is 120% of your font size. In other words, with 10-point type you end up with 12-point line space, baseline to baseline. (If you use a different font size, this will obviously change.

There are 72 points in an inch, so that means you can get 6 lines per inch if you are using single line spacing with a 10-point font. (72 / 12 = 6).

If you have 1-inch top margin and 1-inch bottom margin on your page (Format | Document), that means you have 9 inches of printable space on a standard 11-inch sheet of paper.

If you have 6 printed lines per inch (step 3) and 9 inches of printable space (step 4), that means you have 54 printed lines per page.

You can adjust margins, font size, or line spacing as necessary to get a desired number of lines per page.

If you need to print double-space lines, then use the Indents and Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box (Format | Paragraph) to set the Line Spacing to "Double." The only thing this does to your calculations is to divide the number of lines per page (step 5) by 2.

If you can follow all of that, you can set your document to be exactly 25 lines per page. Good luck!

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Comments

The method described certainly can be made to work ... but it's perhaps overly complex. Word has much simpler tools built in.

Line numbering is a very common requirement in legal contract work, depositions and court reporting, screen-writing and some other professional uses of Word. It is built in and very easy to use:

See Word Help:
------------------------------
Add line numbers to an entire document

On the File menu, click Page Setup, and then click the Layout tab.
In the Apply to box, click Whole document.
Click Line Numbers.
Select the Add line numbering check box, and then select the options you want.
--------------------
An average page of double-spaced text in 10 or 12 point fonts is 25 lines ... and if submitting work to a publisher double spaced is almost always what they want.

So I would first do as you suggest, turn off "widows and orphans", type what I needed to say ... fiddling with lines per page while creating sounds counter-productive, Then turn on double line spacing and turn on line numbering. I tried this on a couple documents and the adjusting to get 25 lines per page is very easy, at worst just a couple clicks in or out on the default side margins.

You can print the document with line numbers on, or save and turn line numbers off before printing as required by your customer.

Hope this helps
Dave

Posted by: Dave Starr at August 7, 2006 4:37 PM

Good tip, Dave, but you're solving a different problem. Getting numbered lines is straightforward, as you say. Getting to have a fixed number of lines on each page is considerably more tricky.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at August 7, 2006 7:21 PM

Actually, Dave, Dave's (This could get confusing!) solution makes use of Word's line-numbering feature to avoid both the calculations in your solution and the necessity of counting lines in the OP's current practice.

Dave (Starr) makes this clear in his last two paragraphs.

One thing that's not clear in his post, though is how adjustments to the 'side' (ie. left and right) margins changes the number of lines on a page. My choice would be the top and bottom margins, with the larger change assigned to the bottom margin.

Also, assuming Word permits saving empty documents with assigned margin, spacing, font and size settings, the last step in the process would be to delete the text from a copy of the document, then save it as a template for future use.

Regards,
Barry

Posted by: Barry at August 9, 2006 10:20 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!