Let me (or us, as the case may be) help with questions regarding Office 2007

[Mark_Ryle]

@Dead_Badger

Y’know how everything typeset in Word looks like dogshit? That’s because it doesn’t do kerning by default (or decent justification, or any of those things that have made typography not shit for the last umpteen years, but that’s by the by). Anyway … it [Word 2007] actually does support proper kerning, it just doesn’t enable it. If you [1] open a new document, [2] right click and select Font…, then [3] choose the Character Spacing tab, and [4] check “Kerning for Fonts”, setting it to something like 8 points and above, then [5] click the “Default” button, all of your documents will magically look much, much better (assuming you’re using a font with proper kerning tables; the new Office fonts such as Calibri and Cambria have these).

What does this 8 points setting mean in “Kerning for fonts”? When I perform this procedure I notice no difference from Word’s default justification. I am able to specify any value from 8 to 72 points but no matter which I choose the text looks the same, as far as I can see. I’m using Cambria 14 font.

Following Badger’s second recommendation in that post indeed results in dramatically improved justification:

[ul]
[li]Office Button > (uppermost left corner of Word 2007)[/li][li]Word Options >[/li][li]Advanced >[/li][li]Layout Options > (at the very bottom of the dialog box)[/li][li]Do full justification the way Word Perfect 6.x for Windows does >[/li][li]Ok[/li][/ul]

This does the job very nicely and I will always use it from now on when I justify text. But what is the relation between these two procedures? Are they supposed to do the same thing? Why doesn’t the first one seem to work for me?