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From: kaufman@neon.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Fractional widths confusion
Message-ID: <1991May11.073924.13068@neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 11 May 91 07:39:24 GMT
References: <1991May11.011753.4423@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ca , USA
Lines: 27

In article <1991May11.011753.4423@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr) writes:
.Ordinarily I never use Geneva in my documents, but recently I was printing
.a long Word 4(A) document for a friend and it was all Geneva. I was printing
.on a Personal NT. There were some titles etc. in bold, and I ran into the
.old problem of weird character widths (esp. the space). I discovered two
.things:

.2. Before I thought of 1, however, I naturally tried the "Fractional
.widths" in Page Setup. This worked for me before. This time the printout
.looked as if it came out of a bitmap! Normally Helvetica is somewhat heavy;
.this time all letters had very skinny and rather irregular strokes... BTW,
.I did have Font Substitution checked, so no, it wasn't trying to print
.Geneva. What gives? Is it a bug in Word? Just curious.      E.

It turns out the Fractional Widths disables font substitution, so you WERE
trying to print Geneva.  Even if font substitution did work, the lines would
probably look a little funny because Geneva metrics are not the same as
Helvetica metrics.  Why not change the document font to Helvetica?

If you wait for system 7, you will get "Real" Geneva in TrueType outline
form.

The whole "Font Substitution" hack should, IMHO, have gone away when folks
had enough space on a hard disk to store real Helvetica, Times and Courier
fonts.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@Neon.stanford.edu)