Match Paragraph style to PDF/acrobat?

the space and alignment was just perfect. It allowed us to keep the text relatively small, spaced out enough to avoid to much space the governing can cause, while not looking space and empty. there not a whole lot of text, so I needed to balance it out where it didn't left 1/4page looking empty and wasted. There's 3 sets of text boxes aligned on the left and right, and the words reaching to the boxes boarders tighter makes the whole page look clean. I've been playing with the exact same content, exact same text/font, for the past 2 days in Illustrator and I can NOT get it to look right. I've done plenty of text shapes and boxes, and I've usually had more room to play with it because it was still in the process of "being" made, where has already been made and now I'm having to translate it to Illustrator while preserving the document that the client (my wife) really like. I mean, its not the end of the world if it has to change. But is that really something a designer should jump to if it was a client that was paying me a lot. ya know? So ya, I'm kind of fixated on it now, thinking... "What is causing the difference, and how can I compensate? There's GOT to be a way."