Words keep expanding not spaces

Question

I have just started using pages and have imported a book that my mother is writing. I have to say that compared to Word, I love the way that pages works but there is one problem.
The majority of text is "Justified" on the page but there are some words that are being pulled apart at the end of a line. As I am aware, justification should expand the spaces between words to fill the line but in this case individual words are being expanded instead and it looks horrible:
The sentence ends a bit l i k e  t  h  i  s  .
At first I thaught that it was extra spacing caused by confusion after importing from Word, but when I moved the cursor over the text, it jumped the gap between the letters meaning that there is no written space. I cant find any tick boxes and when I play around with the text spacing settings, it effects all of the text.
Any ideas?
Dan
iMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   iWork 06

Answer 1

Hullo Daniel:
Pages should justifiy correctly, except for two known glitches which are not what you are reporting. They are, i) justification is spread across the whole line for the first words after a page break until a line break is reached (remedy, insert a return and type ahead of it), and ii) - very rare - sometimes the justification ends with a line return one character short of the right margin (remedy, expand the character spacing by 1% and return any ligatures within the line to 0% after that. Both of these bugs have been reported.
I doubt that what you have is a Pages bug. Use Font Book to "validate" your font: select it within Font Book (not the font panel!) and go to File > Validate Font. This will report any problems. Anything not found by this means probably originates from your source material's justifying algorithm. Accordingly you should find that any means of forcing Pages to reformat the material should work.
Try for example expanding the character spacing by 1% via the text inspector, and then returning it to 0%. To do this you need to select the text first (use keyboard shortcuts under the Help menu to find the quickest ways to do this for a block of text) then open the text inspector to make your adjustment. If the character spacing shows no percentage, this is most likely the problem.
Setting left as Dennis suggests should also force reformatting, but you should be able to return to justification afterwards without the problem recurring - unless your source program has inserted some kind of kerning spaces which upset the Mac OS X algorithms. If so adjusting & readjusting spacing is more likely to get rid of them. Check your fonts too, as Dennis suggests.
Mac OS X can handle Windows True Type fonts, but not Windows Postscript.
However let me repeat: you should be able to justify. When did you last read a full-length book that wasn't, and why shouldn't you see how it looks?
Personally I think the only writing that should be constrained to a manuscript format is on the back of a postcard.
Cheers.
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.7)