Hi Jeff:
Ok, I guess that I've always assumed that if certain parameters
were kept the same between locations, then the application would
always tend to reflow the document the same.
That's perfectly true. However, it comes unstuck a bit here:
1) Word X uses QuickDraw, Word 2004 uses ATSUI, Word 2000 uses GDI, Word
2003 uses GDI+. These are different engines for laying out text (among
other things). They will result in subtle differences between the shapes
and metrics of characters in the same font.
2) Network printers get up to a few tricks to improve their ability to
process text in a hurry. One of them is to use pre-composed character
images in a font cartridge designed for fast access.
This means that the "common" fonts will be "resident" in the high-end
printers. If they are, there is no guarantee that they will be made by the
same font designer. And no guarantee that the resident fonts will not be
substituted by the printer.
That's the main reason a quality Word Processor should look at the printer
driver: to work out what's resident, what will be substituted, and what has
to be sent with the document, and for the ones that are resident, what their
metrics are.
In the old days before the IS Department morphed into the "Department of
No!" people who wanted to do high-quality printing could install their
printer driver locally and tweak it to leave things alone. These days --
good luck!
Word has one of the most accurate WYSIWYGS around (yes, there are better,
but not many...). To get it that accurate, Word must respond to the metrics
derived for the whole print chain.
Word basically hands a document over to Apple OS to both display and print.
It tries as best it can to return the metrics from both the OS and the
Printer so it can display the result.
If you clone the same software versions onto the same machine hardware and
point both machines at the same network printer using the same driver, your
document will be pretty stable. That's not the real world.
Also, other potential processor settings (such as kerning) could
be turned on in one location but not another resulting in
inconsistent line breaks between locations as well. This metric
also doesn't seem to be stored in the document file.
Word stores the Kerning toggle, and the size at which kerning begins, in the
document. However, proper automated kerning requires a kerning pairs table
for each size of each font. Word's kerning is not at that level of
sophistication.
My past experience was primarily with PostScript printers which I
supposed reduce these types of problems a bit.
Naaahhh.... They're worse
At least with an inkjet, you can rely on the
fact that NO fonts are "resident"
As this thread has progressed, I've become more aware that the
issues I was really exploring was how much I can rely on any
ability to:
1) Eliminate character changes when Microsoft fonts of the exact
same name but different versions are used.
The older the font, the more trouble you're in. Mac fonts prior to OS X
were largely non-Unicode. Very old PC fonts prior to Windows 95 were also
non-Unicode.
Results can be a bit variable if you have those in the mix. Character
substitution will not occur if the fonts at both ends are Unicode. With the
exception of the Euro symbol, Microsoft has not added any characters to the
core fonts for a while, as far as I know.
2) Reduce line break inconsistency when page sizes and identical
fonts are used (seems not totally possible now due to different
print drivers and other display metrics that aren't stored in the
actual document).
You have no hope with line breaks. But if you use the techniques Beth
pointed you to to format a document so it automatically flows and paginates
correctly, your page breaks will be exact.
The real key to this is to alter the approach from trying to "Control Where
You Do Want Page Breaks" to trying to "Control Where You DON'T Want Page
Breaks."
If you use text flow properties to tell Word where you DON'T want a page
break, Word will achieve about a 98 per cent result for you, dependably and
automatically. You may have to tweak one or two pages in a hundred.
If you want to get closer than that, you need a page layout program.
Again, my assumption originally was that if the same exact fonts
were being used except for variations in the version number, the
fact that the doc is being viewed on a Mac or PC didn't come into
the question. I had heard that essentially a character or symbol
in a given version of a specifically named font might not still
be in that same position in a later version of that font (I.e.,
the forward compatibility of the various font versions)
If my assumption was correct, all I needed to do was ensure that
I only used the most common fonts that Microsoft has always
traditionally distributed with their Word applications over the
years. This would be fairly simple. If it's true though that
fonts of the same name do not have this forward compatibility in
character positions, then it becomes a far greater problem.
Your assumption "ought to be" correct. If a font is a Unicode font (and all
modern Microsoft ones are) then each character in the English, European and
Chinese and Japanese languages (and a few others) has a defined character
number between 1 and 65,000.
No font contains all 65,000 characters. But most of the Microsoft fonts
contain the most common 576. Modern Apple fonts are the same: some of them
do not contain such a wide range of characters. But within the Macintosh
International character set, every character has the same character number.
However, you have to be careful of Unicode characters in the "Private Use"
area of the Unicode standard. The "Apple" symbol and the "Command" symbol
are two. The Unicode value for those may produce a different character in a
non-Apple font.
And I am sure there are some font foundries around that have not been
absolutely rigorous in their use of the Unicode standard.
But I believe your assumption is absolutely safe for common characters in
the English language in Apple and Microsoft fonts. Someone will find an
exception...
I am also beginning to get the feeling that font metrics such as
character widths can change from version to version in the same
font name. This, of course, can change the position of soft line
breaks during reflow so I'm wondering if this is true or not.
Yes, it is very definitely true. Fonts designed for a PC will be "hinted"
to display better on PC display technology. Fonts designed by Apple will
look their best in Apple display technology. I think of Formata, a
favourite of graphics designers on a Mac which looks utterly disgusting on a
standard corporate PC display.
This is not the old 72 dpi vs. 96 dpi discussion: Macs have been 96 dpi or
better for a long time now. But Mac ATSUI and QuickDraw do not render fonts
exactly the same as Windows does. Once you add font smoothing and Clear
Type and various other "make them look better on screen" rendering tricks to
the mix, you will get very different line endings.
Which is why I suggest that you do not waste energy or time chasing line
endings. Get your pagination right and let them flow: the result will be
quick, automatic and cost-effective.
If you need to get closer, InDesign and Quark Express are your friends
However, I would expect a document written with Times version 1.0
to look identical if rendered with Times version 2.0 (if such
version numbers actually exist) all other things (including print
drivers now
being the same. I've not gotten a clear answer on
this one yet.
You have now: "No. Not necessarily." If Elliott has just had lunch with
the font designer, said designer will now have a bad headache and a
determination to fix up his nasty metrics in version 2...
The only constant in the computer world is "change". One of the compromises
a type foundry makes when designing a font is which characters to include as
pre-compiled glyphs, and which to compose of independent glyphs. There are
all sorts of price/performance/size/aesthetics trade-offs involved.
Microsoft commissions its fonts to look best on a PC. It commissions its
Mac fonts to most closely match the PC result on the Mac. This is a change
from its previous policy. A few years ago, Microsoft fonts for the Mac were
designed to look best on a Mac, and to hell with PC compatibility. Now,
they have made the other choice. I happen to think it's the correct choice,
given that Mac users whose documents will never go anywhere near a PC can
easily deal with the situation by using other fonts (e.g. Apple fonts)
instead, but I better there are some different opinions out there
That is exactly how I've been approaching it currently. If I
remember correctly, Mac OS X comes with Arial and Arial Narrow.
However, I'm using the version provided By MS simply on the
chance that it has a better compatibility with the PC world of
Word. Is this an issue or not?
Ugh... I'm not sure on that one. I think "Arial" comes out of the same
font foundry for both companies, but that the Mac version has about half the
number of characters. Don't quote me on that.
years, I've discovered that by understanding exactly what it can
and CAN'T do, I can maximize how it can be used. It's a bad
substitute for a page layout program, I know.
Yes. It is. By design. That said, I don't have a page layout program here
either (well, I do, I have a very elderly version of PageMaker here
somewhere...). I tend to push Word within an inch of its life to achieve
the result I want.
But I argue ferociously with Elliott from time to time on this issue: I need
Word to continue to do what it does (reflow text efficiently) to get my work
done. Elliott wants its typography improved, presumably so he can get HIS
work done better
I am sometime left with less than one working day to proof and publish a
2,500 page document. A proper graphics designer or compositor might work
for a week on just two pages. We will use different tools, and expect a
different result. Each of our different customers will get what they pay
for, but my customers won't pay for me to be pfaffing around with kerning,
and his won't pay for crappy hyphenation.
So the trick is, how can you make Word behave as closely as
possible to a simple layout type program when you have no control
over the destination environment.
Read the stuff Beth sent you to. Get to know it well. Then come back here
and we will give you a master class in getting "close enough" quickly and
efficiently in Word.
What are the things that I CAN
control to minimize significant changes to a document when
someone receives it and displays it onver some other version of
Word on another platform?
Your style definitions
Some important secrets:
1) No blank lines. None at all. You cannot control the pagination of a
document that contains blank paragraphs.
2) No hard page breaks if you can possibly avoid them. Not because they're
bad ion themselves, but because every time you change the document, you have
to move them ALL. Use Keep With Next instead.
3) Use only "space after" on your body text. Don't use space before.
4) Use "space before" as well as space after on your headings.
5) Think carefully about where you use, and do not use, "Keep With Next".
Basically, ON for headings and List styles, OFF for everything else.
6) Floating objects are very difficult to handle and error-prone. Try to
avoid them as far as possible, because when they play up they really stuff
your pagination.
7) Make a choice between Widow/Orphan Control versus Keep Lines Together
for each style. Basically, I never use Widow/Orphan these days. Paper is
not that expensive and readers hate chasing paragraphs across pages: it
breaks their concentration and there's no need for it. Lawyers would have a
different answer because of their very long paragraphs.
8) Set your margins correctly: allow for the binding margin, and don't
allow anything to hang outside the page margins.
9) Resolve all of your Tracked Changes, then turn OFF Show/Hide to do your
penultimate Proofing pass. Hidden and non-printing characters make a big
difference.
10) The Print Preview view is editable: look up the Help to see how. Do
your final proofing pass in Print Preview. When you do, be aware that Print
Preview makes savage demands on your machine resources. Do very little
editing in that view, stop as many other applications as you can before
going into Print Preview, and Save very frequently: crashes are common due
to the truly outrageous computing demands this view generates. The
difference is that Print Preview reads the printer driver and draws every
character individually, using the font outlines you are going to use to
print with. The Print Preview display is within one pixel of perfect
WYSIWYG. That requires sheer horsepower
11) Make sure you have found and turned off "Allow A4/Letter resizing."
12) If you were silly enough to use "Shrink to fit" then you would be too
silly to be asking these questions, so I am sure you're not going to do that
There you go: "Camera-Ready Publishing With Microsoft Word, Course 101"
Cheers
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
