BUG!! Word 2016 fails to print margins correctly / messes up layout (Possible OpenType .otf Font bug)

Hey all

I'm surprised/not surprised that Microsoft has not replied to this post but let me fill you in. 

As an Enterprise customer with 8500+ affected machines, I did open and escalate this issue with Microsoft a number of months ago. They have acknowledged the problem and are currently working on a HotFix - involving both the OS and Office engineering teams. The last update I received about 10 days ago was that I should have a patch to test in November/December, with a worldwide release in December/January (assuming all goes well). 

The only workaround that was feasible for us was to install Word 2013 in parallel to Office 2016 for my users that had critical need. Everyone else is either avoiding OTF fonts where they can, or delaying their projects until a permanent fix is deployed. 

My organization uses Minion as our standard font, so it really is a BIG deal.

I think what's most interesting about the problem, is that in researching Minion and OTF fonts, the OTF font was developed JOINTLY by Microsoft and Adobe to ensure cross-compatibility. #FAIL

My organization uses Minion as our standard font, so it really is a BIG deal.

I think what's most interesting about the problem, is that in researching Minion and OTF fonts, the OTF font was developed JOINTLY by Microsoft and Adobe to ensure cross-compatibility. #FAIL

The issue is with any fonts that originated as type 1 PostScript fonts — which includes most of Adobe's "Pro" fonts (like Minion, Garamond, etc.). In a thread about this topic on an Adobe site where I started to try to resolve this issue, an Adobe font specialist said:

“The primary difference between the OpenType CFF and OpenType TrueType fonts is the outlines and hinting technology used by the font. OpenType CFF uses the same Bezier curve and hinting mechanism used by the original Type 1 fonts used in the original PostScript printers and use a coordinate system based on 1000. OpenType TrueType uses the quadratic curves and programmatic hinting mechanism used by TrueType fonts, using a coordinate system based on 2048.”

That certainly held true for my testing*.* I even joined the Adobe TypeKit program to have access to their excellent fonts, but cancelled the subscription when I learned that Word was unable to cope with them*.*I too find it surprising that this would still be unresolved, since Microsoft's corporate clients are quite likely to use such fonts as their standard for documents.

If you read any book about typography line spacing is defined as the sum of a font size and leading (see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading) both are values in the unit points defined as 1/72 inch due to typographic history and completely independent for a certain font design. The result always is an exact decimal value. A kind of "Arial line spacing" or "Minion line spacing" doesn't exist. The leading is not part of the font design. The only indirect line spacing feature as part of a font design is, that a 10pt Arial compared to 10pt Times New Roman need not to give the identical size impression (the visual glyph sizes need no to be identical). But the line spacing defined as font size  + leading i.e. 10 +2 = 12 must be the exact value independent from the chosen font, otherwise a typographic designer wouldn't be able to design so called line grids (http://thinkingwithtype.com/grid/)  for books using different fonts.

But the best esthetic line spacing is dependent from the chosen font and the used fon sizes, yes that's true. But a line spacing value of 1, 1.22 etc. is an exact decimal number. To combine this exact number with obscure dynamic factors derived from a certain font (which factors?) contradicts to an intuitive usability concept: So at least this line spacing should be called "Microsoft automatic" then I immediately know this is a kind of an implemented bug, like all other features in Word named with "auto..."

I must say this because all automatic Word features result in bugs because Microsoft never implement functions based on use cases but on statistical behaviors of customers (Example: if a customer uses a number at the beginning of a sentence this is because he wants to introduce a list, so let's automatically adjust a list style and a list format to this sentence). And Microsoft never tests implemented features against typical (very different) use cases. Otherwise they would have realized the side effects that all automatic features imply, at least if you want to use Word for longer documents. So this is the same with the obscure Open Type line spacing feature. The incorrect page numbers in TOC and index I think are also due to the strange line spacing calculation.

You are absolutely correct about leading Dieter. I was thinking about the font's "x" height when I wrote that. A single-spaced 12pt face with a large "x" height like Cambria should end up with exactly the same number of lines on a given page as a single-spaced 12pt face like Book Antiqua with a small "x" height.

However, for my project with the incorrect index page numbers, when I did set the line-spacing to an exact value (rather than single spacing), the numbers were still off. This would seem to indicate that the index was using page numbers that had been calculated from the index marker's location rather than the actual page where they existed when the printer driver had done its layout.

My "fix" was to use an inferior alternative to the Adobe Garamond Pro font face that did not use the CFF version of OpenType. I have subsequently redone the book with the Adobe font using the fix suggested from these forums, and the problem was eliminated.

Thank you EricQc's for the update. You are the only one that actually is making sense. 

We published our first book (600 page statistic book) using Word 2007 with no problem. I am close to finalizing our second 600 page statistical book only to find I can't convert it to a PDF or even print it properly though it looks great on the screen.

Ironic that I was planning to publish in January. I can't believe that there isn't an uprising and lawsuits.

Outraged.