Word has traditionally had kerning turned off by default - I believe to allow the accurate reproduction of old documents such as military service memos. You might just need to turn it on.

I did turn kerning on. I highlighted the whole document (or even just parts of it), and then: Format —> Font —-> Character Spacing —> Kerning for fonts __ points (in this case 12) and above, checkmarked. I turned it off an on repeatedly, and nothing.

If other fonts are kerning fine then the font is likely the culprit, and I’m sure underware will have heard of the problem and may be able to provide a fix.

> Word has traditionally had kerning turned
> off by default - I believe to allow the
> accurate reproduction of old documents
> such as military service memos.

So you say that Microsoft cares for military
more than for typography? :(

To be honest I don’t know the history of the default, maybe performance related? I do realize that it’s incredibly hard to change defaults without users complaining. But Office, to their credit are trying to break some of the conventions - a good blog on their work is located here…

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx

I found this post interesting with respect to defaults…

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/09/528593.aspx

Interesting, I’ve oft complained about kerning in Word. I hardly ever use it so I never knew about being able to turn it on.

I think it’s the font after all. I’ll either have them fix it or get permission from them to convert my PC version of Dolly to OpenType format, which should work just fine.

I don’t know why you mentioned the “.afm” file unless it was to note that the font designer created kerning pairs; neither Word nor Mac OS X uses “.afm” files. If you insist on using fonts only in the old LWFN/Suitcase paired format, the kerning information would have to be in the suitcase’s ‘FOND’ resource.