Character box too large

[janlabe]

I installed a font with good unicode support for Arabic transliteration
(FreeSerif). The font has all the needed characters and looks nice, but the
character box for each glyph is about twice the size of Times New Roman for
the same point size and it shows as gray or light blue instead of black on
the screen. This causes a large space between successive lines in a
paragraph. I can't find an option that seems to apply to fix it and Windows
XP seems to think it is a good TT font. I'm using Word 2002. I vaguely
recall seeing this question before but I can't find it in the group. Sorry
if this is a repeat.

 

[Stefan Blom]

I don't know about the color of text, unless it can be altered
via Format>Font (but you've probably already tried this).

You should be able to deal with the line spacing issue by
specifying a fixed value: On the Format menu, click Paragraph.
Click the Indents and Spacing tab. Under Line Spacing, select
"Exactly", and specify the desired amount (some trial and error
might be needed to find the proper value).

Of course, if you are formatting your document using paragraph
styles, you can make the modification in the style definition.

 

[janlabe]

Thank you Stefan. I can force the spacing to a value that works using
paragraph formatting. This adds yet one more step to the process that is
already tedious, but it works. Inserting transliterated text is an area the
developers could productively explore as the current method of entering hex
unicode code points is tiresome and error prone.

 

[Stefan Blom]

I'm glad I could help.

Note that with paragraph styles, you can store text formatting
(font, font size, color, line spacing, space after, space before)
for easy re-use. For more, see:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart1.htm

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm

http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/styles/TipsOnStyles.html