Re: Line Spacing Question

From: Peyton Todd (PeytonTodd_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 01/24/05 

Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:53:09 -0800

Thanks, Suzanne, but I had already tried the Arial Unicode MS font. Yes, it
seems to have the characters I need, but whenever I insert--> symbol one of
them into the page, it adds a space after it, which looks dumb. Except that
apparently it's not a space in the sense of an extra character since, if you
backspace over it (a single keystroke), the character itself goes away along
with the space. So it seems the character itself containg whitespace to its
right.

What I had been using to get around that problem - part of the complicated
solution involving the Tavulsoft 'keyboard' I described earlier - turns out
to be Lucida Sans Unicode. Experimenting Jezebel's solution of specifying the
line spacing exactly, I was surprised that it seems to work! It's perhaps not
exactly Jezebel's solution, which, as I read it, seemed to suggest making the
line spacing big enough to accomodate the larger size of the symbols (even
though their stated pointsize was the same). Because I can REDUCE the line
spacing so it looks right!

I know very little about fonts. I was thinking of each character as a single
bloc, like the hunks of metal I remember from print shop in high school
(Atlanta, Georgia, 1955). So I assumed it was just a certain size and that's
it, which is why the line spacing got bigger when I added the character. But
I find it lets me take it down further after all. Which suggests each font
must have a default area around each character.

But maybe that's not true, either, since Word lets me cut down the line
spacing down to where the characters on successive lines actually overlap
each other. Right now I have it down to 9pt., and the font itself is only 11
pt.

So now my only problem is that the Lucida Sans Unicode font looks like
boldface, which I wish it did not.

Also, I'm curious: What is the default line spacing of a Word document. I
believe that's what I had. When I take just any paragraph and go to Format
--> Paragraph Spacing --> Line spacing --> Exactly, it defaults to 12 pt. But
to my eye, 12 pts look slightly smaller than my paragraphs.

Peyton

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

> To add to what the others have said, I would suggest that you first look at
> the Latin Extended A and B and IPA Extensions character subsets of Times New
> Roman in Insert | Symbol. There are, as Pat has pointed out, built-in
> keyboard shortcuts for many of these characters, and you can assign your own
> for any character. If these are not sufficient to your needs, then look at
> the Arial Unicode MS font (it comes with Windows but may not be installed).
> I think you'll find its IPA Extensions include everything you could possibly
> need. There is no reason you couldn't type your entire document in this
> font, which your publisher is also bound to have.
>
> --
> Suzanne S. Barnhill
> Microsoft MVP (Word)
> Words into Type
> Fairhope, Alabama USA
> Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
> Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
> all may benefit.
>
> "Peyton Todd" <PeytonTodd@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:93AFA0BA-5252-4FBF-84E5-C8E306E73916@microsoft.com...
> > Hello. I expect this will be a tough question to answer.
> >
> > A little detail first, then I'll get to my question...
> >
> > I am writing a book in linguistics, and I don't have a publisher yet, but
> > most tings written in the field tend to be in a font which looks like
> Times
> > New Roman. And I believe lots of publishers nowadays just photocopy what
> you
> > send. So I'm writing the book in Times New Roman.
> >
> > But I need to include a lot of examples of speech using the International
> > Phonetic Alphabet. The fonts which come with Word don't have anywhere near
> > the full set of symbols necessary, but I have found and installed a font
> > which has everything I need. It's a complicated system involving a program
> > called KeyMan by Tavelsoft Corp, and virtual 'keyboards', including one
> with
> > IPA symbols in Unicode. (Colleagues have reported getting drafts rejected
> by
> > publishers who didn't have the same plug-in they were using when they
> wrote
> > their book or article.)
> >
> > Well, the symbols look great, and they're easy to use (different
> > combinations of keystrokes lead to the desired characters, like typing
> Ctrl +
> > ~ and then 'n' to get an n with a tilde over it in Spanish, but a lot
> moreso.
> >
> > But here's my problem. When I stuff some symbols into a line, say as
> follows:
> >
> > asdf asdf asdf asdf xxxx adf asdf asdf afdf
> >
> > where xxxx is the symbols, the line spacing between that line and the one
> > before it widens. So all the other lines in the paragraph look fine, both
> the
> > lines before the one I put the symbols in, and the ones below that line,
> but
> > the paragraph looks funny. I can nearly fix this by reducing the fontsize
> of
> > the symbols by a couple of points (e.g. the Times New Roman in 11 pt. and
> the
> > symbols in 9 pt.), but now the symbols look small and silly.
> >
> > By the way, the symbols are an Arial font. But that's apparently not the
> > problem. I find it's possible to mix Arial and Times New Roman fonts on a
> > line without this problem occurring as long as they're all regular
> characters.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > everything ihaven't checked with the publisher yet, a linguist, and I need
> > to write articles
> > --
> > Peyton Todd
>
>

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