MS Word, TNR and bad kerning.

A. Scott Britton10 Nov 2004

Let me begin by saying that I actually don't have a problem with Microsoft as a corporation, however...

What's the deal with the really [really!] bad kerning of some diacritical characters (both tilde vowels and macron vowels) in Times New Roman in MS Word?

I just didn't expect two industry standards (Word and TNR) to act so sporadically; I really thought every aspect of TNR would have been absolutely perfect.

Si?

Si_Daniels10 Nov 2004#

Can you send me a doc and a screen grab?

simonda[at]microsoft[dot]com

A. Scott Britton10 Nov 2004#

Thanks Si, I'll send something tonight (I'm at work, won't be at my own computer till later).

azeli10 Nov 2004#

Scott, I am afraid there are no kerning pairs for accented characters in TNR at all. I have just looked at its kerning table and it lists 877 pairs. If you take into account that the font contains over 1600 glyphs, you can imagine how far from perfect this font is.
Si, I hope you need not see any screenshots as proof, don

Si_Daniels10 Nov 2004#

I'd still like to see the specific problems and file a bug against the font.

kakaze11 Nov 2004#

Doesn't word have it's own version of automatic kerning?

Thomas Phinney11 Nov 2004#

No. Word has kerning off by default, and if you turn it on you get the kerning built into the font.

Or at least you're supposed to. For a few years, every other Mac version of Word broke kerning by reading the pairs backwards. So you'd end up with kerning for aV but not Va, that kind of thing. I believe they have gotten over this one now.

Cheers,

T

geraintf11 Nov 2004#

>off by default
is there any reason for this?

and can we expect future versions to have a presumption in favour of kerning :?

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