Mac Forum / Applications / Word / February 2006

But it used to be fine. In fact the same problem resolved itself (I did
so many things I can't be sure what did it) now the propblem has
re-surfaced. Someone has suggested it might be an OS 10.3.9 thing?

I can't find anything on HP's website either. I have a later version of
the problematic LaserJet in my office and there are no isues there...

Actually, also, on top of that, it's not just character spacing, but I think
line spacing too, because it always seems that Microsoft Word has the lines
too close together.

Oh, and if you put one piece of text in Word in Arial size 9, for example,
and then put the exact same text, in the same font and size in Microsoft
Word, the compression is completely different.

Is there no such thing as standardisation?

Hi Tyler:

On 15/2/06 5:17 AM, in article
CBE185B0-02E6-40CD-9358-A052B27FF53E@microsoft.com, "Tyler Flynn" <Tyler
Flynn@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

Because you may have enabled Justification, Kerning, Hyphenation or
PostScript printing options in Word.  Notepad does not support these
features.

Now:  Did you mean "Notepad" and are we talking about a PC copy of Word
here, or did you mean "TextEdit"??

Interesting :-)  OK, that's an artefact of the display resolution.
Microsoft Word makes up its display in "twips", where a twip is one
twentieth of a point (1/1440 of an inch).

Your computer makes up its display in Pixels.  For a 1024 x 768 display on a
15" monitor that's 1024 / 15 = 1/68th of an inch (actually, it's not: 15" is
the diagonal, not the horizontal measurement.  But you know what I mean...)

Your printer makes up its pages based on its dpi rating.  For a typical
high-end printer that's 1/4800th of an inch.

Now:  Notepad/TextEdit simply plop the letters onto the line one beside the
other, each taking up the amount of space indicated by the font outline for
each letter.

Word attempts to emulate on the screen what you are going to see if you
print.  So it first makes up the page image using the resolution and font
scaling reported by your printer driver.  It then attempts to make up a
screen display that comes as close as possible to showing you what that will
look like if you print.  But, as you can see, a display that can't position
things closer than 68 dpi is going to be left with positioning errors of up
to 70 dots.

Word has the choice of either displaying "half a letter" or mis-positioning
the letter slightly.  Nudging the letter too far to the right looks nicer on
screen than chopping off bits of it.

One way of thinking about this is to say that TextEdit's display is not good
enough to show you the problem, Word's display IS.  You should see the same
effect in any application capable of precision text output.  Really high-end
applications such as Adobe CS 2 choose to do things the other way around:
they generate two print images, one using screen resolution, the other using
printer resolution.  You don't "see" the inaccuracies that way, although
they must still be there because computer displays cannot position any
closer than their pixel pitch.

Nothing: The other two applications are lying :-)

Print it.  Believe what you see printed :-)

Cheers