Document Format changes in Word 2004

[TimH]

I have a client with thousands of MS Word Documents created in various
versions of Word, both Mac and PC over the last several years. When a
document gets opened in Word 2004 the line spacing and other
characteristics are differrent. As a result the document does not look
right. This is most noticable in documents that are multiple columns.
Anyone see this and have a solution?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

I have a client with thousands of MS Word Documents created in various
versions of Word, both Mac and PC over the last several years. When a
document gets opened in Word 2004 the line spacing and other
characteristics are differrent. As a result the document does not look
right. This is most noticable in documents that are multiple columns.
Anyone see this and have a solution?

Thanks for any help.

Is it possible That your system is substituting a font he used for what
is supposed to be an adaquate subsitute. (Which may not be.)

You need to find out what font he was using (at least on his Mac system)
in order for everything will line.

Will be tough anyway the way Mac's and PC's treat fonts.

there is a ratio that at work usually

Mac = 72 dpi
PC = 96 dpi

So even if you use the same size and type font it will show 72/96 as
much on the Mac if created on PC.

and would show as 96/72 as much if created Mac and shown on PC.

So you are going to have to choose exact same font style between both
machines. And your going to have to set fonts accordingly to get it to
show you you want it.

Ideal way would be create it use the same font and create PDF. then send
both to other person and he/she can compensate accordingly.

The Perfect Solution which has a "snowball's chance in H***" of
happening is everyone go strictly OpenType Fonts.

Problem is I belive Adobe has the pattent on OT Fonts. and Bill Gates if
he can own it 100% he don't want to go along, or he wants to destroy it.
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112-1809 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://home.kimbanet.com/~pjones/birthday/index.htm>
<http://vpea.exis.net>

 

[Clive Huggan]

Hello Tim,

The underlying reason for what you see is that Word is not a page-based
application -- in fact Word has no concept of pages as such. Any given text
stays on a given page only if the printer driver does not change and the
fonts installed in the computers on which the text is viewed are the same.
And "same" means not just having the same name -- they have to be made by
the same manufacturer.

The differences in pagination are most commonly seen when a document is
displayed on a Mac and on a PC respectively -- usually text on a PC will
take a little less space. But if two Macs (or two PCs) have different
printer drivers selected, the differences may well be seen there too.

I do a lot of cross-platform work between Macs and PCs, with all sorts of
drivers involved. I minimize (but don't always eliminate) differences by
using only Microsoft's Times New Roman and Arial fonts (and occasionally
Courier New and Wingdings). These are the same fonts that come with
Microsoft Windows. Boring but reliable (the prettying-up comes later).

People who need cross-platform compatibility avoid hard page breaks but
instead build things like page breaks into their styles. It's possible to
produce documents that paginate well on any computer, so long as you don't
expect identical appearance in all instances. For appearance that's
identical to what's on your computer, you need to produce a PDF (which I do
when I send a file generated in Word to a client for printing) or use page
layout software.

For a broader discussion of interchangeability of documents between
computers and techniques to minimize such differences, see <Appendix A: The
main "minimum maintenance" features of my documents>, on page 125 of "Bend
Word to Your Will", a free download from
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/WordMac/Bend/BendWord.htm

This is as much as I can give you in response to your fairly generalized
question. If you need more information, post back with more details -- e.g.
what's meant by "the document does not look right", and what you are aiming
for.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

* WAIT FOR CONSIDERED ADVICE: If you post a question, keep re-visiting the
newsgroup for several days after the first response comes in. Sometimes it
takes a few responses before the best or complete solution is proposed;
sometimes you'll be asked for further information so that a better answer
can be provided. Good tips about getting the best out of posting are at
http://www.word.mvps.org/FindHelp/Posting.htm (if you use Safari, you may
need to hit the circular arrow icon -- "Reload the current page" -- a few
times).

============================================================

 

[Clive Huggan]

On 14/11/04 12:16 PM, in article (e-mail address removed),

there is a ratio that at work usually

Mac = 72 dpi
PC = 96 dpi

So even if you use the same size and type font it will show 72/96 as
much on the Mac if created on PC.

and would show as 96/72 as much if created Mac and shown on PC.

Phillip, I understand 96 dpi is the native resolution nowadays on Macs and
PCS. And I have to say that I have *never* had a discrepancy of 1:1.33
(=96/72) between Word docs on the Mac and PCs -- and that's before SE30 days


The difference when one uses Microsoft's boring TNR and Arial font sets is
incredibly small -- at most one line per page.

Maybe it's that Virginia humidity!!

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

 

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

On 14/11/04 12:16 PM, in article (e-mail address removed),




Phillip, I understand 96 dpi is the native resolution nowadays on Macs and
PCS. And I have to say that I have *never* had a discrepancy of 1:1.33
(=96/72) between Word docs on the Mac and PCs -- and that's before SE30 days


The difference when one uses Microsoft's boring TNR and Arial font sets is
incredibly small -- at most one line per page.

Maybe it's that Virginia humidity!!

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

If Mac has switched to 96dpi, I am unaware of it. I use a ATI Radeon Pro
9000 Card to use my Mitsubishi DiamondPoint NX86LCD DVI monitor and as
far as I an tell it 72dpi.

I have a friend that's in a Association I am in and we work together on
Asssociation matters (we are officers) and stuff he sends show up larger
that should be for me. And if I send him something he usually has to
change font size.

If he types something in 9 point it looks 12 pt to me.

May be the Va Hummidity .

Although sometimes he send s stuff with Shiruti(?) font (i'd love to
have it just to see what it looked like, i've tried to locate a place to
download on ms website. OSx can use MS TT fonts natively.) Most of the
time he sends in TNR.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112-1809 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://home.kimbanet.com/~pjones/birthday/index.htm>
<http://vpea.exis.net>

 

[Elliott Roper]

If Mac has switched to 96dpi, I am unaware of it. I use a ATI Radeon Pro
9000 Card to use my Mitsubishi DiamondPoint NX86LCD DVI monitor and as
far as I an tell it 72dpi.

You were probably still in nappies. Somewhere about 1986. ;-)

This 72/96 only applied to bitmap fonts. Nobody, but nobody, uses
bitmap fonts any more.
Ever since, with Postscript, Truetype, OTF, whatever, there is no such
thing as dots per inch. And not only that, *those* inches were
fictional anyway.
The font size in points, of which there are more or less 72 in every
real inch, is the distance between the top of ascenders (think lower
case b) and descenders (think y) plus an historical little bit. The
historical little bit was when type was set in hot metal. The font size
was what you measured with a micrometer with a slug of type in its
jaws.
Slugs were whole lines of type cast in some daft tin lead zinc alloy.
OK, I exaggerate and over-simplify, but that was part of the history.

Nowadays the pixels per inch on a screen are all over the shop. This
Powerbook of mine has 1024*768 pixels on a 12.1 diagonal screen.

Lemme see now. sqrt(1024^2+768^2)/12.1 = 105.785123966942 pixels /inch
Mitsubishi Diamond Point NX86LCD is 1280*1024 and 18.1" viewable
Shoving the same pythagoras at it yields 90.563525126122 pixels /inch
You will find the same thing over on the dark side. Every screen is
different.

When it comes to printing, everyone is using the same inches and points
and the same document with the same typeface and the same margins with
the same printer drivers *should* look exactly the same, no matter how
'magnified' the screen picture is. The size of the on-screen imaage is
utterly irrelevant to the point size. For instance, displaying the
exact same file on my Powerbook and your gorgeous Mitsubishi Lancer
EVO-6 turbo would show your characters as being almost 17% larger than
mine. And we are both on Maccas.

After all that, some fonts *look* bigger than others, both on-screen
and printed. Fonts whose x-height is large compared with their font
size - in other words - the ascenders and descenders are relatively
short, such as Times New Roman, look a lot bigger on the page than say,
Adobe Garamond or Zapfino to choose a ridiculous example.

If your associate is substituting fonts, that might explain why the
printed page seems to have bigger type, but it has nothing to do with
72 or 96 bits per inch. That went out with Mac Paint.

I have a friend that's in a Association I am in and we work together on
Asssociation matters (we are officers) and stuff he sends show up larger
that should be for me. And if I send him something he usually has to
change font size.

If he types something in 9 point it looks 12 pt to me.

May be the Va Hummidity .

Although sometimes he send s stuff with Shiruti(?) font (i'd love to
have it just to see what it looked like, i've tried to locate a place to
download on ms website. OSx can use MS TT fonts natively.) Most of the
time he sends in TNR.

Finally, I wouldn't trust TNR on Windows and Mac to be utterly
identical. They should be awfully close, but I'm willing to bet there
is more than one version of the font out there with slightly different
metrics just to frustrate Word users trying to preserve pagination
across printers and platforms. Remember that heaps of printers have TNR
resident. That will come to bite you in some programs (not Word) that
leave the Postscript in the printer to break left justified lines.
Other printers may turn your type into ransom notes, because their font
width tables differ from yours.

 

[TimH]

Clive,

Thanks for the response. I realize that what you indicated is the case
in MS Word as it is in a few other apps as well. I also realize I was
a little general in my question. I was hoping the general nature of my
question would get a response from someone like yourself that may have
some insight into the problem without me posting a huge dissertation
on what the problems are that are being experienced. Now, if you will
indulge me, I will elaborate. Again, thanks for your response. I think
you may have the answer to my problem.

My client has 8 different people who will either create or edit/modify
MS Word documents. These people will use any one of three Wintel
laptop computers with various OS versions and various Word versions or
8 different Mac laptops that are all configured identically. Over the
many years this client has used every version of MS Word from the
first available on both the Mac and the PC. The print drivers setup on
the Macs are all the same. The fonts on the Mac are all the same. We
first discovered this problem about four years ago when a document
created on a Win 2000 laptop with Office 2000 would look different in
that environment from when it was sent to a Mac and opened in OS 9 and
Word 98. The problem was even more confusing as the lines of text
would break at different points so the first line seen in column two
on page one would change to a line four or five lines before or after,
depending on if the document was going Mac to PC or PC to Mac. The
client lived with the problem through this period but now that Word
2004 is here there is a twist to the problem.

Now working on just one Apple laptop running Panther 10.3.4 with print
drivers installed for a Xerox 8400DP, HP OfficeJet 7110, HP4V and an
Epson 1520 he can open a word document created with Office v.X and the
document paginates correctly. The next thing we did was to install
Office 2004 on this same computer. We left Office v.X in place. We
open the same document in Word 2004 and the pagination changes. The
line of text at the top of column two on page one is not the same as
it was in word v.X. If we don't save the document, quit word 2004 and
open the document in Word v.X again, the document is fine. The client
is now looking at eliminating Office 2004 and going back to Office v.X
because he is afraid that the thousands of documents created in his
speaking and consulting business will all reformat if he has to
re-open or re-print any of them for any reason.

Office 2004 has several options that can be set to maintain format
compatibility from previous version of Office and Office 2004.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to determine the combination of
settings to accomplish this. Using the preset selection suggested by
Word 2004 does not work.

So to summarize, the problem with format changes between the Mac and
PC computers have been long standing and have been lived with through
having a set of procedures that all the individuals follow to minimize
the problem. If we can get a concrete solution to the cross platform
format issue that would be the best situation. The new and much more
critical problem is the format change to documents opened on the same
computer with the only change being opening the document in Office
2004 instead of Office v.X.

As you can see from this more detailed description, the solution you
had indicated in your earlier post although correct, sould not apply
to the current problem as the version of Office is the only
difference.

If you have any other suggestions I would be very happy to hear them.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Clive Huggan]

Tim,

Never feel reluctant to give a dissertation -- it helps to increase the
likelihood of a highly focused answer!

The situation you describe is very like my own, including the PCs + Macs
situation. And although most of my documents are subsequently laid out in
Quark XPress, many are printed from Word or viewed straight from Word in PDF
format.

I skipped Word X, because I wasn't satisfied with its implementation, so I
don't have practical experience of the phenomenon you mention -- nor can I
test documents in the two versions. However, I think I know the cause: to
allow Office 2004 to support Unicode fonts, which had been at the top of the
wish list from users, Microsoft had to switch from using QuickDraw to draw
the screen to Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI). This is a
noticeably different (and better) display.

As to the rest, having got to the limit of my knowledge on X/2004 display
I'll recommend you wait till John McGhie comes by (he's particularly busy
right now so it might be a day or two) or one of the other MVPs.

The short-term solution would seem to me to be to stick to Word X, but
someone else may well have something (e.g. a particular setting adjustment)
that I haven't heard of.

Ultimately, of course, you can't stick to Word X forever. In the longer
term, getting rid of hard page/column breaks and any other formatting that
is influenced by pagination would be advantageous (in my own work I create
PDFs to show the other party what the doc would look like, leaving Word to
paginate as it feels like in the electronic version, in which headings --
applied by styles -- and tables, lead-ins to bulleted lists etc
automatically flow to the next page because of their formatting rather than
by hard page breaks and the like). Even the most demanding documents, such
as those with photos in, require very little adjustment when formatted for
minimum maintenance. Some ideas along thee lines are in "Bend Word to Your
Will" -- Appendix A: The main "minimum maintenance" features of my
documents.

All this aside, referring to the previous Mac <-> PC problem, I'm a little
surprised that the PC and Mac versions were 4 lines different per page, even
if the document were in two columns. I suspect the fonts are different,
albeit with similar/identical names. I would consider using a macro to unify
them (there's one in "Bend Word to Your Will" -- do a Find command for
"NormalToArial" and you'll see what I mean.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

 

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

You were probably still in nappies. Somewhere about 1986. ;-)

This 72/96 only applied to bitmap fonts. Nobody, but nobody, uses
bitmap fonts any more.
Ever since, with Postscript, Truetype, OTF, whatever, there is no such
thing as dots per inch. And not only that, *those* inches were
fictional anyway.
The font size in points, of which there are more or less 72 in every
real inch, is the distance between the top of ascenders (think lower
case b) and descenders (think y) plus an historical little bit. The
historical little bit was when type was set in hot metal. The font size
was what you measured with a micrometer with a slug of type in its
jaws.
Slugs were whole lines of type cast in some daft tin lead zinc alloy.
OK, I exaggerate and over-simplify, but that was part of the history.

Nowadays the pixels per inch on a screen are all over the shop. This
Powerbook of mine has 1024*768 pixels on a 12.1 diagonal screen.

Lemme see now. sqrt(1024^2+768^2)/12.1 = 105.785123966942 pixels /inch
Mitsubishi Diamond Point NX86LCD is 1280*1024 and 18.1" viewable
Shoving the same pythagoras at it yields 90.563525126122 pixels /inch
You will find the same thing over on the dark side. Every screen is
different.

When it comes to printing, everyone is using the same inches and points
and the same document with the same typeface and the same margins with
the same printer drivers *should* look exactly the same, no matter how
'magnified' the screen picture is. The size of the on-screen imaage is
utterly irrelevant to the point size. For instance, displaying the
exact same file on my Powerbook and your gorgeous Mitsubishi Lancer
EVO-6 turbo would show your characters as being almost 17% larger than
mine. And we are both on Maccas.

After all that, some fonts *look* bigger than others, both on-screen
and printed. Fonts whose x-height is large compared with their font
size - in other words - the ascenders and descenders are relatively
short, such as Times New Roman, look a lot bigger on the page than say,
Adobe Garamond or Zapfino to choose a ridiculous example.

If your associate is substituting fonts, that might explain why the
printed page seems to have bigger type, but it has nothing to do with
72 or 96 bits per inch. That went out with Mac Paint.




Finally, I wouldn't trust TNR on Windows and Mac to be utterly
identical. They should be awfully close, but I'm willing to bet there
is more than one version of the font out there with slightly different
metrics just to frustrate Word users trying to preserve pagination
across printers and platforms. Remember that heaps of printers have TNR
resident. That will come to bite you in some programs (not Word) that
leave the Postscript in the printer to break left justified lines.
Other printers may turn your type into ransom notes, because their font
width tables differ from yours.

I use the version of TNR installed by the system (OSX.3.6).

I assume (yes I know the little reference about assume.) He use the
version shipped with his system.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112-1809 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://home.kimbanet.com/~pjones/birthday/index.htm>
<http://vpea.exis.net>

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I use the version of TNR installed by the system (OSX.3.6).

I assume (yes I know the little reference about assume.) He use the
version shipped with his system.

AFAIK, TNR doesn't ship with the system - instead OSX includes "Times",
which is definitely different than "Times New Roman". However, the TNR
that ships with Office 2004 is a full Unicode version, while previous
versions weren't.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Tim & Clive,

There's a possible simple fix here, though it's probably too simple for such
a complex situation .

Tim, what font is used in these documents? If, for instance, it's Times New
Roman, then the version in Office 2004 is different from that in Office X
(because of Unicode support). What if you copied your Office X version of
the font into Office 2004 and disabled the newer version? You'd lose all
the Unicode characters, but you didn't have them in Office X anyway. It's
worth a try at least.
--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

AFAIK, TNR doesn't ship with the system - instead OSX includes "Times",
which is definitely different than "Times New Roman". However, the TNR
that ships with Office 2004 is a full Unicode version, while previous
versions weren't.

I guess its because I've used Word since 6.0.1a / Excel 5.0.1a that I've
had TNR. installed for years.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |MEMBER:VPEA (LIFE) ETA-I, NESDA,ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112-1809 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://home.kimbanet.com/~pjones/birthday/index.htm>
<http://vpea.exis.net>

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hey Tim,

With regards specifically the differences you're seeing in the same document
between MacWord X & MacWord 2004:

MacWord X and WinWord 2003, layout text on the page differently. (i.e. The
apps use different kinds of calculations to space words/letters etc... on
the page)

In MacWord 2004 we changed the way we layout text on the page to match the
way WinWord 2003 lays out their text.

In this sense, our goal was to make MacWord and WinWord more compatible
going forward, the result of this change is the possible difference you see
in the document going backwards to MacWord X.

With regards to fixing this particular issue, I honestly do not think there
is much that can be done. MacOffice X, and previous versions had their own
way of layout out text, and changing this for MacWord 2004 provides superior
compatibility

All I can suggest, is that for this particular situation you start creating
new documents on MacWord 2004, since going forward you will have improved
compatibility with WinWord.


Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send email directly to this e-mail address. It is for
newsgroup purposes only.

Find out everything about Microsoft Mac Newsgroups at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups]
Check out product updates and news & info at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac]

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hello,

MacWord X, uses as default, the font Times.

MacWord 2004, uses as default, the font Times New Roman.

One difference between the two is that Times does not support Unicode.
Times New Roman does.

However, Times is also included in the suit of Fonts for Word 2004. So if
you open an Word X document which uses Times font in Word 2004. It would
still display in Times font.


The MacWord Times font can also play a role in compatibility with WinWord,
since WinWord does not have the font Times. So when it opens a MacWord
document with the Times font it performs a Font Substitution with the font
Times New Roman.

MacWord 2004, now uses Times New Roman as the default font, so when one
takes the document cross platform to WinWord 2003, no font substitution is
needed and the document should appear the same.

--

Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send email directly to this e-mail address. It is for
newsgroup purposes only.

Find out everything about Microsoft Mac Newsgroups at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups]
Check out product updates and news & info at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac]

 

[Clive Huggan]

Jeffrey,

Thank you for this information, and in your previous post -- it has filled
in the few missing gaps for me.

Cheers,

Clive
============================================================

Hello,

MacWord X, uses as default, the font Times.

MacWord 2004, uses as default, the font Times New Roman.

One difference between the two is that Times does not support Unicode.
Times New Roman does.

However, Times is also included in the suit of Fonts for Word 2004. So if
you open an Word X document which uses Times font in Word 2004. It would
still display in Times font.


The MacWord Times font can also play a role in compatibility with WinWord,
since WinWord does not have the font Times. So when it opens a MacWord
document with the Times font it performs a Font Substitution with the font
Times New Roman.

MacWord 2004, now uses Times New Roman as the default font, so when one
takes the document cross platform to WinWord 2003, no font substitution is
needed and the document should appear the same.

--

Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send email directly to this e-mail address. It is for
newsgroup purposes only.

Find out everything about Microsoft Mac Newsgroups at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups]
Check out product updates and news & info at:
[http://www.microsoft.com/mac]

Tim & Clive,

There's a possible simple fix here, though it's probably too simple for such
a complex situation .

Tim, what font is used in these documents? If, for instance, it's Times New
Roman, then the version in Office 2004 is different from that in Office X
(because of Unicode support). What if you copied your Office X version of
the font into Office 2004 and disabled the newer version? You'd lose all
the Unicode characters, but you didn't have them in Office X anyway. It's
worth a try at least.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Phillip:

Didn't we get an answer to this in another thread?

With Word 2004, Microsoft changed the "Default Font" from Times to Times New
Roman, to provide a better match with Word documents coming from a PC.

You do not have to use the default font in Word, but unless you set your
Normal template to be something else, it will be Times New Roman.

Times New Roman is a lighter weight with different metrics to Times. So
yes, documents produced in Times will look a bit different when expressed in
TNR. For most documents, the changes will be trivial. If the document was
not correctly word-processed in the first place, you will find it full of
hard page- and column-breaks. If it is, then the result will be quite
messy.

The best answer is to simply reformat each document as you come to it: the
valuable documents are the ones you are more likely to want to use, and
these are the ones more likely to have been properly formatted in the first
place and to suffer the least damage from the transition.

If that's too much work, you can easily switch the font back to Times by
defining the Normal style to be Times in each document. You can do this
with an AutoOpen macro in the Normal Template. Give me a shout if you need
to know how to do this.

Most people would suggest that if you must use Times, TNR is a nicer
implementation of it. Of course, if you want to use a full character set,
you must use TNR, since Times does not have the full set of Unicode glyphs
in it. (Neither does TNR, but it has the 512 most common, compared with
about 260 for Times). Unicode, of course, supports 64,000 glyphs so we
still have a way to go.

Naughty persons with a copy of PC Word available will find they have a copy
of Arial Unicode MS amongst its fonts. If you were to somehow "migrate"
that font to your Mac (for personal use only, of course...) E.g. copy Arial
Unicode MS.ttf from your PC Font folder onto a disk and walk over to your
Mac with it... you just might find that Word 2004 will use it for you.

Under protest: it's not happy, but it will use it. You will need to
re-start Word to use the font, and it will appear out of alphabetic order in
the list. But it will be there. It's not such a nice-looking font anyway:
the compromises necessary to get all 32,000 characters from Unicode 3.2 into
only 22.3 MB do not lend themselves to elegant typography. But if you must
have all 32,000 characters so far defined in the standard, Arial Unicode MS
is now possible in Word 2004...

Hope this helps

I guess its because I've used Word since 6.0.1a / Excel 5.0.1a that I've
had TNR. installed for years.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410