What's up with my character spacing?

February 19, 2008 11:37 PM

When I print from Word 2004 (Mac), the character spacing is slightly off, but definitely noticeable. Random letters in random words will be closer or further apart than other letters. This happens when I print to a PDF or physically print a document, but not in the regular Word display. What's going on?

I uploaded an image here that shows what's happening. Not so extreme on every word, but it all looks a bit off. I've tried different fonts and tried restarting everything. I tried printing from other applications, but I keep getting errors (may be a whole 'nother issue entirely).

posted by wsquared to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Are you running Leopard? It looks like there's a problem with ligatures with Word 2004. It looks like there's no fix yet as Leopard forces ligatures to always be on, but Apple is reportedly working on it. However, this Help entry brings some hope as it looks like you can tell Word to enable ligatures. However, that may only apply to Word 2008.
posted by zsazsa at 11:52 PM on February 19, 2008

Try turning on Fractional Widths (in the Print section of the preferences).
posted by D.C. at 2:28 AM on February 20, 2008

Could it be that specific font? Have you tried comparing one shipped from APPL versus one shipped from MSFT?
posted by cmiller at 7:51 AM on February 20, 2008

Does it only happen with word? Could be as simple as bad printer drivers/firmware.
posted by jeffamaphone at 12:03 PM on February 20, 2008