These problems have been occurring for many years and have nothing to do with Adobe or Acrobat.
Simply stated, Office applications often make formatting decisions based on “unconventional” interpretations and use of metrics of particular fonts. And seemingly, the problems are exaggerated even more when creating PDF files or outputting to a real printer. The problems typically most often occur when using typefaces with large complements of glyphs and/or with glyphs for ornaments or special characters that have “bounding boxes” larger than those of the base ASCII character set. Many Adobe OpenType Pro fonts fall into this category. Note that with professional layout tools, these problems don't occur. And unfortunately, there is nothing that the font vendors themselves can do to remedy the problem.
In my personal experience, at least some of these issues can be avoided by defining styles and using same that avoid concepts such as single spacing or anything based upon what Microsoft Office application may wrongly interpret single spacing (or double, 1.5, double, triple, etc. spacing) to be. For example, instead of defining text to be 12 pt. with single spacing or more likely multiple 1.2 spacing, define the style to be 12 pt. with exactly 14.4 pt line spacing. This bypasses Office's own interpretation of what single spacing (or multiples thereof) is for a particular font.
This doesn't bypass the problem of differences in the horizontal character spacing which often depends upon which printer / driver is currently defined as your “default” while editing the document. Horizontal character spacing within Office often varies depending upon the stated current resolution of the current printer / driver.
- Dov
- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
10
Replies
AdChoices