Hypatia Sans Pro fonts and Page Break Locations

Question

I got the Hypatia family of fonts from Adobe a while back. However, I have a persistent issue in word documents where the page breaks in preview mode and print mode (be that to a printer, or Adobe pdf, or Microsoft pdf) are different.

If I substitute another font (e.g. aerial, times) in place of the Hypatia font the problem does not occur. Is there something in the Hypatia font family that causes this to happen or is there a setting I need to adjust?

It's a great looking font and I really don't want to have to switch to another.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Dov Isaacs · Answer

Unfortunately this is a known problem with Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) for well over 20 years!

Simply stated, for calculating page layout including line breaks and page breaks, these applications do not use the actual font metrics themselves, but rather, metrics derived from the actual font metrics based on the resolution of the “current device” whether that be the screen, a PDF file creator, or a real printer. Your screen might be seen by Word as having 96dpi while your printer may be 300, 600, 1200, or more dpi! In the process of calculating these resolution-dependent metrics, round-off errors occur and accumulate. Enough such round-off errors are enough to cause the layout differences that you see. The longer the line of text in terms of characters, the more likely you will see this effect.

And although you haven't (yet) seen this peculiarity with Arial and Times New Roman, we have seen it with virtually any font used with the Microsoft Office applications.

We and many users have complained to Microsoft about this over the years, but the severity of the problem doesn't seem to impress them.

Sorry!

- Dov

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