Nonprinting Characters

Every character you type is entered into a Word documenteven characters that normally can't be seen, such as space, tab, return, line break, and optional hyphen characters.

Word enables you to display these nonprinting characters (Figure 28), making it easy to see all the characters in a document.

Figure 28. Text with nonprinting characters displayed. This example shows space, paragraph, and line break characters.

Tips

• Nonprinting characters are sometimes referred to as formatting marks or invisible characters.

• By displaying nonprinting characters, you can get a better understanding of the structure of a document. For example, Figure 28 clearly shows the difference between the return and line break characters entered in Figure 27.

To show or hide nonprinting characters

Click the Show/Hide ¶ button on the Standard toolbar. This toggles the display of nonprinting characters.

To specify which nonprinting characters should be displayed

1.	Choose Word > Preferences (Figure 29). Figure 29. Choose Preferences from the Word menu.
2.	Click the View item in the Preferences dialog that appears (Figure 30). Figure 30. The View options of the Preferences dialog.
3.	Turn on the check boxes in the Nonprinting characters area of the dialog to specify which characters should appear.
4.	Click OK.

Tips

• To display all formatting marks, turn on the All check box in step 3.

• Word's Preferences dialog is discussed in detail in Chapter 20.