About text alignment for East Asian, South Asian, or right-to-left languages
The feature or some of the options described in this Help topic are only available if support for an East Asian, South Asian, or right-to-left language is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
Text alignment determines the appearance and orientation of the right and left edges of a paragraph relative to the text box margins (and any indents). The most common alignments are left, right, center, and justified.
You set alignment on the Indents and Spacing tab of the Paragraph dialog box (Format menu).
Text alignment options
- Left The leftmost character of each line is aligned to the left margin, and the right edge of each line is ragged. This is the default alignment for paragraphs with left-to-right text direction.
- Center The center of each line of text is aligned to the midpoint of the right and left text box margins, and the left and right edges of each line are ragged.
- Right The rightmost character of each line is aligned to the right margin, and the left edge of each line is ragged. This is the default alignment for paragraphs with right-to-left text direction.
- Justified The first and last characters of each line (except the last) are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by adding or subtracting space between and within words. The last line of the paragraph is aligned to the left margin if text direction is left-to-right, or to the right margin if text direction is right-to-left.
- Distributed The first and last characters of each line (except the last) are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by adding or subtracting the same amount from each character. The last line of the paragraph is aligned to the left margin if text direction is left-to-right, or to the right margin if text direction is right-to-left.
- Distribute All Lines The first and last characters of each line (including the last line of the paragraph) are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by adding or subtracting the same amount from each character.
- Newspaper Same as Distributed, but uses East Asian metrics. This option is only available if support for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Korean is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
- Justify (Asian) Same as Distributed, but uses East Asian metrics, and scales the spacing by the width of characters. This option is only available if support for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, or Korean is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
- Inter-word The first and last characters of each line (except the last) are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by adding or subtracting space between (but not within) words. The last line of the paragraph is aligned to the left margin if text direction is left-to-right, or to the right margin if text direction is right-to-left. This option is only available if support for Thai, Hebrew, or an Indic or Arabic language is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
- Distributed, Center Last Same as Distributed, but the last line of the paragraph is aligned to the center. This option is only available if support for a South Asian language is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
- Inter-cluster Same as Distributed, but clusters are not broken. This option is only available if support for a South Asian language is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
- Kashida The first and last characters of each line are aligned to the left and right margins, and lines are filled by dividing the amount between the space character and kashida, based on slider control. This option is only available if support for Arabic is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.