RE: that font-letter spacing problem - MS Word issue?

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jul 11 2007 - 02:39:19 CDT

  • Next message: James Kass: "RE: that font-letter spacing problem - MS Word issue?"

    I contacted Carl offline; he indicated that he's using Word 2000. One issue I encountered numerous times with Word 2000 is that it grouped characters from scripts it wasn't specifically designed into an East Asian bucket, and then would apply CJK logic - one symptom of which being that the character spacing might be way off for the particular script and font. That looks to me like what is happening in this case.

    Peter

    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Magda Danish (Unicode)
    Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 1:14 PM
    To: unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: FW: that font-letter spacing problem - MS Word issue?

    Carl,
    I am re-sending your message to the Unicode list, this time with a smaller size attachment. I'm hoping someone will look into your problem and help you solve it.
    Magda

    ________________________________
    From: cmasthay@juno.com [mailto:cmasthay@juno.com]
    Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2007 10:38 AM
    To: Magda Danish (Unicode)
    Subject: that font-letter spacing problem
    [16 May 2007]

    I have solved many of my Unicode problems. My computer already has the capability, and a nearby friend showed me how to download successfully foreign fonts and to load them into my Fonts folder to be accessed successfully too. But there is the problem with fonts that cannot be tightened up; that is, there is an unwanted space after most single letters of them, and the words and sentences do not look the way they ought to.
    Can any one of you offer any suggestions as to how I can fix this problem?
    I was again back to studying Georgian (gruzinskiy). If I wrote to a friend in Georgia, the message would be too greatly spaced out. Please look at the attachment (if it does show in this message) and see how the letters are far too open with Arial Unicode MS. With the "paragraph" symbol on the toolbar being clicked on, I can see that I have indeed given only one space for each actual word, but there is the inherent space problem with each letter on its right-hand side. The computer sequence is top toolbar > Format > Font > Character spacing > Preview panel. Notice that the preview panel shows the correct letter spacing, whereas the actual text is wide open! Kerning choices were entirely ineffective no matter what I changed as if to compensate.
    Can anyone help with a way for me to solve this current pressing little problem!
    I noticed that after I downloaded a Tibetan font I was similarly unable to tighten up the letter spacing, but I cheated by using the Tibetan upper dot, which is assigned in Tibetan to separate each word. A space-bar space resulted in an unwanted Tibetan letter. I don't know whether the Georgian font problem is related to the Tibetan font problem.
    Arial Unicode MS has the following: Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, nonligatured devanāgari, Bengāli, Gurmukhi, Gujarāti, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Thai, Lao, Georgian, Hangul, etc., kana, Hangul etc., half characters. In this font, I did not test the other language scripts for this spacing (or kerning) problem.
    Thanks,

    Carl

    Carl Masthay (linguist, retired editor, Algonquianist), 838 Larkin Ave., St. Louis, MO 63141-7758 USA; (314) 432-4231; cmasthay@juno.com<mailto:cmasthay@juno.com>
    [Don't pronounce the "h" in my surname from Polish Mastaj/Mastej.] For my picture and my third book, please see:
    http://www.puzz.com/kaskaskiadictionary.html



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