On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Peter Knutsen wrote:

> Todd wrote:
>> So, Peter and Torben, what it sounds like you are saying is that I can use my
printer to
>> determine what Lulu's printed word would look like. In other words, my 8
point Times New
>> Roman is going to be pretty close to their 8 point Times New Roman. I just
wasn't sure if this
>> was the case or if there might be some distortion on one of the two fronts.
>
> Actually there might be. When I convert an MS Word document to PDF
> format, it seems to me as if the document shrinks somewhat, for some
> very strange reason, with the margins becoming larger on all 4 sides of
> the paper, and everything within those margins shrinking every so
> slightly. The difference is minor, though.
>
> For all I know a similar effect could occur at some point in the Lulu
> guys' process.

If you upload your document as a PDF, I don't think so (at least, I
haven't experienced any such). What happens when Word is converted to
PDF is anyones guess, so I shouldn't wonder if something goes wrong
here. IIRC, Word itself can not output PDF, so you typically use a
3rd-party tool to do so, often in the form of a pseudo-printer (that
prints to a PDF file instead of paper).

When you convert from Word to PDF, fonts are converted from TrueType
to PostScript fonts. Normally, equivalent fonts are found instead of
actually trying to convert the outlines (which is tricky, as TrueType
is based on quadratic Bezier curves and PostScript fonts on cubic
Bezier curves), but the equivalent fonts might not be exactly the same
-- often TrueType copies of copyrighted fonts deliberately introduce
small differences to avoid legislation. Also, kerning may be
different. Word is notoriously bad at kerning, so when you convert to
PostScript and PDF, you get better kerning, but this might change
spacing a bit. Also, ligatures for ff, fi and fl might be slightly
different.

Torben