Let me amend that statement. Half point increments are ok. Anything else right of the decimal is a no go though.
As Pork Rind said, tried that and it will only accept half-point increments.
I think that we’ve ruled out any solution that exists within Word for Mac, so any workaround will involve moving the final document into a different program and playing with it a little before printing (via Word for Windows, LaTex, or Libre). Before, we were sending it to someone else to do this step on a Windows machine, but I really would rather be able to do it myself because it’s my grant and I’m the one who knows what it should look like.
I just tried Libre, and I’m pleasantly surprised at how much better it’s gotten since I first used it (which was probably over a decade ago). It does print 11pt to PDF, and it handles figures much better than it used to. However, it also expands the size of the font on the page a bit, so everything moves around and the document ends up longer (11 pages became about 11.5 pages). I think this would be an excellent option when I’m offsite and don’t have access to a Windows machine, but I will need to keep in mind that I need to leave extra space for expansion.
I also downloaded LaTeX, and I think it’s a bit beyond me. I’m sure I could figure it out if I needed to, but it looks like a lot of work and I’m tired after a long conference.
I’m sad that we didn’t find a clean option within Word for Mac, but there are at least 2 solid workarounds.
To be clear about LaTeX (and ConTeXt), those are professional-quality systems that are good (I speak from personal experience) for preparing documents ab initio, or you could import your existing project into it and completely abandon the Word version, but what would not really work smoothly, and would be a pain even to attempt, would be to turn a Word document into a LaTeX document and tweak it so that the LaTeX version looks identical to the Word version. Like I said, it is not a converter.
I am sad to hear that Libre Office moves things around when you open up a Word file. When you say it expands the size of the font on the page, what do you mean exactly? I figure 11-point Arial-MT stays 11-point Arial-MT, but does the vertical space between lines change, or the space between words, or something of that nature?
Yes, this sounds like it would be awesome if it were just me, but a bad collaborative tool.
I went back and looked at the two files. The vertical spacing is the same, and as far as I can tell the size of the letters/words is the same. It looks to me like Libre is making slightly different decisions on spacing between words, and that’s creating more lines of text on average. Some paragraphs stay exactly the same.
I remember in the 90’s we had numerous font issues when outputting for Mac and PC.
It all started because Adobe thought they could collect royalties from the use of their fonts. When Microsoft got fuller into the desktop publishing business, they decided to come up with their own font system, TrueType. Moreover, while Times New Roman was as common as dirt and considered open domain, Helvetica, the most popular sans-serif font, was owned by Adobe. MS thus produced Arial, which looked similar enough to Helvetica, but different enough in a legal sense.
While I love Adobe products, trying to control the font market was a pretty dickish move on their part. Adobe and Microsoft eventually collaborated and released OpenType, which was usable by both platforms. When Distiller made PDFs capable of embedded fonts, the issues largely disappeared, but some still linger.
I just tried out Save As PDF from MS Word on a Windows 10 machine and checked font sizes in Acrobat Pro.
Arial 10 point came out as 10.08
Arial 11 point came out as 11.04
Arial 12 point came out as 12
Ditto for TNR.
My personal theory is that the above numbers are evenly divisible by 12, there’s some kind of “12 is divine” thinking on part of the coders.
I just tried that, my Arial 10 point came out as 9.96.
I just edited the text in Acrobat Pro and made it 10 point inside of Acrobat Pro. Can you fix it that way?
Hmm. Does it make any difference if you (from Word) save the file as .odt (rather than .doc) and then open it in LibreOffice?
LibreOffice has a few settings under Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice Writer -> Compatibility, but the only possibly relevant one seems to be “Expand word space on lines with manual line breaks in justified paragraphs”, and unless you have many manual line breaks it should not matter.
Check also Paragraph Style -> Text Flow in case it is a hyphenation issue.
Sorry I cannot really debug this for you, since I only have LibreOffice installed here without Word to compare it to.
Nope:
Yes, I remember this. I remember that at the time, my attitude was that Microsoft was making money hand-over-fist on Word, and they should damn well pay Adobe for their popular font instead of designing their own to screw Adobe.
Yep.
So, not in this case, but Arial fonts from different suppliers will have different horizontal spacing between the letters. (As you might get moving between Office on one machine and Libre on another, or even just between Office and Libre)
Wowsers.
My version of Word doesn’t allow you to save as an .odt, but I can save as an .odt from Libre, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. I have hyphenation turned off in both programs, it’s a problem for science jargon.
Screen twips are 1440 per inch.
Recent versions of Windows have gradually “improved” scaling. This means you can scale the display to better match pixel and dot and screen size. What you see on the screen is a more accurate reproduction of what you print. Some people think this is a good thing…
Conversion between Word & Libre has some minor differences, like inter-word spacing, paragraphing & hyphenation, and locations of inserts (pictures, figures). Minor, but all the things you’re running into.
Word for Mac is a different product than Word for Windows, and seems to run a version or so behind. But still, conversion between 2 versions of Word is likely to have fewer issues than conversion to Libre. Also, the newer versions of Word seem to be better at conversions.
Given that you could get a cheap computer capable of running Word for under $500, I;d just do that. (Probably less than the value of the your time spent on this.) Then you can take your final version, transfer it to the cheap Windows computer, take one last pass to make sure nothing has changed in the conversion, and then send it in.
One of my relatives is a young college prof. He tells me that 100% of their research writing and collaboration is done in LaTeX. Pretty much everybody in his field, economics, just uses that the way everybody in ordinary business in the 1990s used MS Word. It’s the *de facto *standard. As is R for statistical analysis.
Which does you (OP) no good if none of *your *collaborators use it. I just tell the story to highlight that the obstacle in this case is the users’ familiarity with the tools, not the tools themselves.
This is where I wouldn’t bother and just run Windows in VMWare Fusion of Virtualbox. I have a work-issued PC, but I never use it. The handful of times a year I need it I just run Fusion.
Might not even have to buy a computer. IME, there’s usually a pile of old computers that are free for the asking at most universities. Typically computers that are 5-10 years old, and used to be basic office machines used by admin, or attached to recently decommissioned lab equipment. Just ask the department or university IT people…
VMWare Fusion or Virtualbox