Line spacing (leading) larger than normal in Asian and non-US docs

[EditorRS]

As editor of a technical publication, I receive Word documents (in .doc
format) from all over the world. I often receive Word documents from
countries outside the US in which the font is Times New Roman, 12 pt, with
Paragraph spacing Before and After set to 0 pt and Line spacing set to
single, but in which the actual line spacing (the leading) is a significant
fraction of a point larger than for the same text with the same settings in a
US version of Word. This seems to happen most often with documents from Asian
countries. I have tried changing all of the settings I can find to get the
leading to match the US leading, without success. I have found only two ways
I can get the leading to be set back to the US Word leading. The first is to
save the Word document as text (e.g., MS-DOS text), and then import it back
into a new Word document and reapply all of the formatting (which, for a
document with a lot of equations, is a real pain!). The second method is to
copy "chunks" of text from the foreign Word document into a new US Word
document, being careful not to copy too much (less than a page long seems to
be the maximum that works) and being careful not to copy the space (and thus
the hidden formatting information) at the end of the last paragraph (copying
too much or copying that hidden formatting information will cause the wider
leading to show up in the new document). No amount of changing styles; nor
any of the options I've tried under Tools...Options...Compatibility; nor any
of the options under Format...Font or Format...paragraph seem to have any
effect on this.

What sounds like a similar problem was described by BelD@UWA on 1/15/2009 in
this forum, but none of the responses appeared to solve the problem.

The best clue I can offer to what might be the source of the problem is that
I have observed the increased leading coming from countries using the Asian
versions of Word, but generally not from European or Middle Eastern versions.
My conjecture is that the default for single space in Times New Roman in the
Asian version of Word involves larger leading than for the US version of
Word. Regardless, I can't seem to find any way of correcting the problem. I
would greatly appreciate any help or suggestions.

 

[EditorRS]

Using "exactly" sets the leading to a fixed value, but not to the default
value for US Word documents. It also doesn't allow the leading to vary when
superscripts, subscripts, or MathType objects (for example) are inserted.
What I need is a way to get the "single" value of leading to default back to
the US value, rather than the value associated with whatever country the
document originally came from. Again, I'd appreciate your help.

 

[grammatim]

There's no "default" value. The line spacing under Single changes
according to the fonts that happen to be in use in any individual
line. And there's no reason that would change in different countries,
if they use the same font.

In professional typesetting, you don't want variable line spacing with
superscripts and subscripts; you want sufficient leading that such
items don't look crowded.

 

[Tony Jollans]

I'm sure grammatim knows more than I about this, but, beyond explicit line
spacing, leading is built into the fonts, and line spacing will be
determined by the largest characters (including leading) in the text.
Styling in Word has distinct properties for Western and Asian text, so my
suspicion is that you have some characters deemed Asian that are forcing
this. This is all guesswork but make sure that all text is set to be English
and/or amend the styling of Asian fonts applied to the text.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

www.WordArticles.com

There's no "default" value. The line spacing under Single changes
according to the fonts that happen to be in use in any individual
line. And there's no reason that would change in different countries,
if they use the same font.

In professional typesetting, you don't want variable line spacing with
superscripts and subscripts; you want sufficient leading that such
items don't look crowded.

 

[EditorRS]

Dear Tony,

Thank you! I think you may be onto something here. The leading is indeed
determined by the font. What is frustrating is that I can select a paragraph
of text, Word shows that it is all Times New Roman (by showing that in the
font box on the Formatting Toolbar), and yet the leading remains greater than
for Times New Roman created on "Western" version of Word. Is there a
difference between the Times New Roman fonts installed with Asian and Western
versions of Word? I guess the other way of diagnosing this would be if there
is some way to search for all fonts in a document that are not a given font
(e.g., Times New Roman). Does anyone know how to do that?

I appreciate the help. Thank you!

 

[grammatim]

Search for Times New Roman, and if it Finds less than the entire
document, the point where the Times leaves off is where there's some
other font.

Be sure also to verify that you have the same _size_ throughout your
paragraph. (If the Size window is blank when you select a paragraph,
then at least one character is a different size, probably a space.)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Actually, don't count on the blanking of any window to indicate variant
formatting. Anytime a selection is longer than some vaguely defined length,
Word blanks such settings.

Also, if you use the Symbol dialog to insert a character from a symbol (pi,
dingbat, "decorative") font, Word will still display the default paragraph
font for that character. In the good old days you could toggle fields and
see that this was actually a Symbol field specifying the font, but now this
is hidden (so that the process is "transparent to the user"--such
paradoxical language!), but it is still a covert field. The purpose of this
is to keep it from being converted when the font of the rest of the text is
changed, so of course it is (perversely in this case) unaffected by Ctrl+A,
change font.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

Search for Times New Roman, and if it Finds less than the entire
document, the point where the Times leaves off is where there's some
other font.

Be sure also to verify that you have the same _size_ throughout your
paragraph. (If the Size window is blank when you select a paragraph,
then at least one character is a different size, probably a space.)