Hi Tyler:
On 15/2/06 5:17 AM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Tyler Flynn" <Tyler
Initially, I thought my problem had been solved with this thread, but I
realised it hadn't been.
Perhaps someone can explain why Word or Notepad can display one piece of
text absolutely perfectly spaced (in terms of character spacing) and yet
Microsoft Word will add periodical "random" spacings between letters?
Because you may have enabled Justification, Kerning, Hyphenation or
PostScript printing options in Word. Notepad does not support these
features.
Now: Did you mean "Notepad" and are we talking about a PC copy of Word
here, or did you mean "TextEdit"??
want an example of what I'm talking about, open a Microsoft Word document and
just hold down the letter 'i', and after about the 40th character, a random
condensation is made between two of the characters. You can see this kind of
thing in every typed thing in Microsoft Word if you look close enough at the
random spaces which are added. This makes it exTREMEly hard to keep focus on
the words when there are annoying spaces stuck here and there.
Interesting
OK, that's an artefact of the display resolution.
Microsoft Word makes up its display in "twips", where a twip is one
twentieth of a point (1/1440 of an inch).
Your computer makes up its display in Pixels. For a 1024 x 768 display on a
15" monitor that's 1024 / 15 = 1/68th of an inch (actually, it's not: 15" is
the diagonal, not the horizontal measurement. But you know what I mean...)
Your printer makes up its pages based on its dpi rating. For a typical
high-end printer that's 1/4800th of an inch.
Now: Notepad/TextEdit simply plop the letters onto the line one beside the
other, each taking up the amount of space indicated by the font outline for
each letter.
Word attempts to emulate on the screen what you are going to see if you
print. So it first makes up the page image using the resolution and font
scaling reported by your printer driver. It then attempts to make up a
screen display that comes as close as possible to showing you what that will
look like if you print. But, as you can see, a display that can't position
things closer than 68 dpi is going to be left with positioning errors of up
to 70 dots.
Word has the choice of either displaying "half a letter" or mis-positioning
the letter slightly. Nudging the letter too far to the right looks nicer on
screen than chopping off bits of it.
One way of thinking about this is to say that TextEdit's display is not good
enough to show you the problem, Word's display IS. You should see the same
effect in any application capable of precision text output. Really high-end
applications such as Adobe CS 2 choose to do things the other way around:
they generate two print images, one using screen resolution, the other using
printer resolution. You don't "see" the inaccuracies that way, although
they must still be there because computer displays cannot position any
closer than their pixel pitch.
If Word and Notepad and Internet browsers can display text perfectly spaced,
what's wrong with Microsoft Word?
Nothing: The other two applications are lying
Someone please answer this problem, it drives me insane.
Print it. Believe what you see printed
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 (0) 4 1209 1410
