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Bad Microsoft Word Typography
Published 2 years ago, at the end of July under Design
From the company that popularized Arial, here are three examples of bad typography in Microsoft Word. Bad typesetting in Word finds its way into résumés, business plans, research papers, government documents, even published books. These small inconsistencies and imperfections may be un-noticible in small doses, but paragraph-after-paragraph they stack up—resulting in ugly, visually-incohesive documents. Word isn’t for professional typography work, but that’s no excuse for these typography sins.
Thankfully, all three of these problems I list can be avoided, without giving up on Word entirely. Read-on and I’ll tell you how…
Bad kerning in default fonts
Word 2003 and earlier versions shipped with Times New Roman as the default font. Word 2007 has some new fonts—more on those in a second.
Times New Roman has a few kerning issues that aren’t accounted for in the face’s kerning table. Certain letter pairs get jammed together. Below is a string of text, borrowed from Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, that clearly reveals kerning problems in Times New Roman with the default kerning applied.
The top of the “f”’s collide with their neighbor letterforms. This is a pretty common kerning issue for a number of fonts.
Even fonts with incomplete kerning tables can be properly kerned automatically, just not in Word. Many Adobe products allow “optical kerning” as an alternative method when auto kerning based on kerning tables isn’t cutting it. Here’s the same string and the same typeface rendered with optical kerning. Not perfect—but it’s a lot better.
Office 2007 has some new typefaces, and some of them are quite nice. Calibri passes our kerning test with flying colors, but it’s a sans-serif typeface (not a fair competition!). It’s ideal for screen use, but less-than-ideal for research papers and important government documents.
However, one of the new serif fonts in Office 2007, Constantia, has pretty bad kerning:
What can you do?
Pick another typeface and use it as the default. Book Antiqua, Arno Pro, Garamond—all have good kerning tables and work well in Word.
The default font can be changed under the Format > Font menu (Command D in Office:Mac). After selecting the typeface you want, click the “default” button at the bottom of the screen. Why they didn’t put this under Preferences in Word 2003 is beyond me…
Poor baselines with default headers
The default vertical spacing for headers is a bit haphazard in Word. When you insert a default-styled header, subsequent paragraphs never “sync up” back to the baseline rthymn established by the default line height. The example on the right shows this fairly clearly.
What can you do?
If you use the default header styles, modify them to fit your needs. Via Office help:
- Select and modify the format of the text, paragraph, list, or table you want to update.
- Point to the style you want to update on the Formatting Palette (under Styles), click the pop-up menu, and then click “Update to Match Selection”.
Superscripts that disrupt your leading
When you insert a footnote or use super-scripts, Word will create space for it by bumping the line down a bit. The amount varies from font-to-font and it is especially noticable if you style your superscripts in a different typeface or in a larger size.
The image to the right shows this phenomenon quite clearly. The three red lines are all the same height—the height between the baselines of the first and second lines. The superscript pushes the second line taller, thus disrupting the vertical rhythmn of the page.
Thanks to Tom Laramee for letting me know about this one.
What can you do?
This one is simple. Set your line height absolutely instead of allowing Word to auto-set it.
Select your text, go under Format > Paragraph, and choose “Exactly” under line spacing. Do not use the built-in settings for double and single spacing.
So there’s three egregious typographic sins in Word. They’re not the only ones, and they’re not even the worst ones. Word is a great tool for composing text, but it’s a horrible tool for preparing text to be printed and displayed. You’re much better off with a professional typesetting program like Quark or InDesign.
Go On, Say It!
I am in the process of reading Elements of Typographic Style right now and find myself looking at typography everywhere I go. As I was reading it last night I was wondering how MS Word handles the majority of the discussion to the color of typography and such.
Nice catch with the superscript and rhythm.
I gotta keep an eye on these things moving forward.
How about creating a new Word template (.dot file) with good typographic defaults already in it and offering it for download?
@Nate — It’s really a fantastic book — I’m on my second read-through. Different bits of it are sticking out on my second pass that I missed the first time.
This only scratches the surface of the MS Word typography badness — I’m sure there are a hundred other complaints just as serious as these.
@Andrew — Really good idea, I may do that…
What can you do?
Use Pages. It gives you near total control over everything Bringhurst instructs you in. I gave up on Word a long time ago because of these very limitations.
Don’t forget LaTeX! After I wrote my genetics research project in LaTeX, I’m thoroughly convinced it is the way to go for papers. While you lack WYSIWYG controls, LaTeX gives you full control over the page style. Since it’s primarily used in math and science disciplines, super and subscripts do not damage your leading (subscript example).
For me, TextMate w/LaTeX bundle + SVN + BibDesk + Terminal is the ultimate combination for typesetting general and academic documents.
I never noticed these issues in Word, but now that I know it’s there I’m going to be annoyed about them.
However, in my search for a good alternative, I found that both Arno Pro and Garamond seem to suffer from bad kerning as well. Could this be a Office 2007 thing? Book Antiqua looks fine though.
Another annoying feature of Word is that it sometimes decides to revert to Times New Roman, even if you choose another font as standard. After typing a hard blank e.g. you regularly find yourself using Times New Roman.
I suspect that this thing might happen whenever you type a ”letter” that your chosen font does not contain, but I’m not quite sure about that.
Besides, there seems to be no way round it (short of having no more than a single font installed).
[…] all three of these problems I list can be avoided, without giving up on Word entirely. Read-on and I’ll tell you […]
A bit shocking, the severity of these errors. I used to typeset documents, and the last two issues are the equivalent of failing to use basic shutoff codes. Word is known for being not-worth-the-money but I’m surprised to see this level of sloppiness in its design.
I rarely use Word, but I’ll have to pay closer attention when I do.
Word WILL use the kerning tables in fonts that have them (printer-resident fonts generally do NOT have built-in kerning), but you have to turn this on manually — and why it’s not a default, even in Word2007, I have no clue. Go to Format, Font, and the Character Spacing tab. Toggle the checkbox for “Kerning for fonts x points and above” (I set mine for 8 points), and to set it permanently, click the button for “Default…”
Word can’t do anything about bad kerning in any particular typeface, and setting character-spacing manually is clumsy at best.
Notes vis-a-vis the article
Palatino Linotype is a better choice than Book Antiqua. It’s more graceful and has better built-in kerning.
With regard to setting Exact line spacing to avoid the issue of Word lowering the baseline to allow for a raised character: I do this too, but be advised that in-line graphics will apear truncated. You can set “Don’t add space for raised or lowered characters” in Tools, Options, Compatibility, but I haven’t noticed that it’s wholly effective; it will depend somewhat on the built-in leading in the typeface.
I recently began using Word 2007 and I had yet to play with fonts. This posting prompted me to test its kerning in Word 2007 with Adobe’s Garamond Pro.
At first kerning was just as bad as Times New Roman — how could that be? So after some searching I found that, by default, Word was not kerning fonts. I had to change that by going to font properties, clicking on the character spacing tab, and turning on kerning for 10pt and above. Adobe’s Garamond then looked superb, while the stock MS(?) Garamond and TNR didn’t even respond to the setting.
Cheers
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I am a graphic design student who is currently taking my first typography course.
Now that I go back and look at some of my old documents created in Word (e.g. resumes), I can see how deficient the program really is in terms of typography.
Thank you for the information!
Another way to control line heights with superscripts is the option “Don’t add extra space for raised/lowered characters.” which is found on the Compatability tab of the Tools dalog box (accessed from the Tools menu).
I have been annoyed by Word’s rendering of the asterisk as always smaller and superscript — sometimes I want it normal size and location. When it is superscripted, it increases the line height — except with this option or making the line height fixed. I don’t like the latter approach because it causes problems with linline images.
Thank you for your good treatment of typography deficiencies in Word.