On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Peter Knutsen wrote:

> Torben AEgidius Mogensen wrote:
>> 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).
>
> Yes, I use a 3rd-party programme called PDFCreator, as a "driver".
>
>> 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.
>
> That still doesn't explain why everything looks slightly "zoomed", with
> the margins being larger. The change in font size is minimal, to the
> point where it can't be seen. All I see is that if I take one printout
> of the Word version and one of the PDF version, and stack them and hold
> the stack up against a strong light, the Word version's "dark area", the
> area that is not margin, is a few mm larger.

It could just be a bug in the converter. I was thinkig it might be
caused by point-size differences (a PostScript point is 1/72", where a
traditional American point is 1/72.27"), but since PDF definitely uses
PostScript points (which are the bigger of the two), I can't see how a
translation would make the text area shrink. There might be rounding
errors in the conversion from Word to PostScript units, but these
would have to be fairly large to be visible.

Torben