If anyone here has Wordperfect 9 I'd appreciate your help.

Corel, for some reason, has chosen to change the "Make it Fit" function so that it works more like Word's (which is the entirely wrong direction to go). Before, I was able to handily turn a 5 page term paper into a 6 page one automatically. Now they seem to be telling me the feature can only make documents smaller. Something about the result being "within 50% of the document's actual size." Is this how it really is, or am I missing something in the feature?

Ha ha ha ha. That's the only thing I ever used "Make it fit" for, too!

I assume you've tried the usual tricks -- increase the right margin by 1/4", switch to double spaced and a bit, increase the size of spaces between paragraphs and between paragraphs and headings (leading, IIRC), use 11pt font instead of 10pt (12pt if you think you can get away with it), increase the top and bottom margins by 1/4" or so, throw in some almost-useless footnotes that take up a bunch of space at the bottom of pages...

Oh yeah, the tricks are all known, it's just that "make it fit" used to automate that and do it all at once so that you had every factor done as subtly as possible.

And I go for the more subtle changes. My teachers usually require 12pt font, 1" margins, and double spacing. So I use a 12.1 or 12.2 font, 1.2" margins, and 2.2 spacing. It doesn't add much, but sometimes it adds as much as a page, depending on how long the document is

Does anyone else think it's kind of silly that they worry so much that the report isn't long enough. In real life shorter is better.

I would also think that the content would be more important than the length of the report...

Stig

Both are true, but this is the educational system of the US we're talking about.

In high school, we had a word number requirement. It didn't matter if it was drivel or not, just so long as it was WORDS. Silly.