line-spacing in Korean MS Word

October 5, 2007 7:37 PM

Line spacing in international (Korean) versions of Microsoft Word?

I teach freshman comp at an American university, and my sections often include international students. I've noticed that some of these students, particularly those who tell me that they're using versions of Microsoft word they've brought with them from Korea, turn in papers with very wide (2.5?) spaces between lines, rather than with the usual double-spacing one would see in papers printed with US versions of Word.

Is there some reason why versions of Microsoft Word from Korea uses such wide line-spacing when printing text in Western characters, and is there any particular difficulty in getting such copies of Word to use the same spacing as American versions of Word? What instructions should I give my students to insure that their lines are spaced in the same way they're spaced by US copies of Word? A few students have said this is a Word issue, and told me that this spacing is somehow difficult to adjust.

At first I thought this was just an odd thing, but I've noticed it now in the papers of several students.

posted by washburn to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I don't know the reason, but I had this problem at the beginning of the school year at my Korean high school. My students eventually figured out that you can uncheck a box in a formatting menu and it will end up correct.

It's not hard to do, just hard to find (I can't be more specific because I use a US version of MS Office).
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:55 PM on October 5, 2007

This used to happen frequently with my assignments back in early high school (I'm Korean). I think the discrepancy arises from the fact that Korean characters are typically of the same height, whereas English characters have varying heights (i.e., capital letters are much taller than lower case letters). From my understanding, other languages with characters of constant height (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) have similar issues with line spacing.

To fix this problem, all you have to do is double-click on the vertical page ruler to the left of the document. Then, go to the "Document Grid" tab, and then have the students pick "No grid" option. The document should now be single-spaced. Changing the format to double-spaced paragraphs should make the document equivalent to the US versions of Word.

If the "No grid" option does not exist, have them specify the line grid, which allows you to limit the number of lines that you can have per page. Double-spaced documents have approximately 25 to 27 lines per page.

I'm afraid I don't know the Korean names of these tabs and options, as I no longer use the Korean version of Microsoft Word. If students are still unable to change the line spacing, you might want to consider assigning papers with a word limit, rather than a page limit (e.g., 4000-word paper rather than an 11-page paper).

Hope this helps!
posted by tickingclock at 1:17 AM on October 6, 2007

Here is a screenshot describing what I mean.
posted by tickingclock at 1:34 AM on October 6, 2007

Thanks tickingclock; it seems like your advice will be quite helpful to me and my students.
posted by washburn at 10:13 AM on October 6, 2007