Lately I've been using OneNote to take meeting notes, project tracking and throw-away to-do lists (like items I need to pack before a trip). For the most part, I like it. It's fast and lets me scrawl notes all over a page in a way that is rivals paper, with the bonus of being legible.
For some unknown reason Microsoft decided that OneNote wasn't deserving of Paragraph formatting. Many of the options from a standard word processor don't translate to OneNote – who needs to set the indentation of a paragraph if you can drag the block of text to the exact position on the page you want? Unfortunately with Paragraph options went the ability to adjust line spacing.
Take a look at some text using the font Impact. Kerning, leading, tracking; it's offensive to every aspect of typography.

Lists fare no better with the bullets nearly overlapping, separated by a mere 2 pixels.

Sadly it seems the only solution for paragraphs is to use a font with 'short' characters, or modify an existing font to increase it's line height.
You do have some options with lists and the Lists palette (Format > Lists) exposes them. Setting 'Between list items' to a value between 2.5pt and 3pt makes quite a difference.

If anyone has found a way around the line spacing issue or has a font that works well I'd love to hear it.





December 4th, 2007 at 1:14 am
[...] Take a look at some text using the font Impact. Kerning, leading, tracking; it's offensive to every … [...]
December 27th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
andale sans seems to have bigger line spacing
October 28th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I have two notebooks where I like to have list spacing set to other than 0.00pt — one of them is my one stop for pasting articles from the web to read and annotate later, and the other is where I manage both blog drafts and published posts.
The solution I've found is to create an outline consisting of two blank lines, set the list spacing as you desire (I set mine to 10pts), and then save the page as a template (I named mine "HTML10pt"), and of course set it as default template for each section within the notebooks. The only caveat is that every time you paste the page from the web, you need to make sure you first click the blank outline instead of pasting right away (when the cursor is in the title, as default). As I understand it doesn't work with IE and Firefox's Send to Onenote plugins, but I don't mind that as I prefer to manually select the content as the plugins tend to leave out comments and the such.
By the way, in all this meantime if you have found an alternative solution please share.