Thomas Payne wrote:
I have just spent a very frustrating day trying to make Arial Unicode MS
work properly.

I have a doc of 871 pages, with lots of linguistic examples from languages
that require special characters. I am supposed to submit this doc to a
publisher by Dec. 10, and I have to use a Unicode font for the linguistic
examples. The problem is certain Unicode characters always seem to have big
spaces following them, like this:
wë runkam? n
There is not supposed to be a space after ë or ?. Please tell me how to fix
this. I have downloaded a couple other Unicode fonts, and they all do this,
so I think it must be something in Word. I don't want to condense just those
characters, because I have no idea what the publisher's word processor will
do with the special formatting (they have warned me not to include nonce
formatting just for appearance sake). Please help!
Tom


I've had nasty situations with Arial Unicode MS in the past too. I seem
to remember that text formatted in this font was displayed far too
large, and the worst thing was, I couldn't change the font anymore; once
something was marked as Arial Unicode MS, it remained that way even when
I tried to apply other settings. I think what I figured out at the time
was that Word thought anything formatted in Arial Unicode MS was East
Asian, and applied the formatting rules for Chinese Han characters.
Maybe your problem is related?

I've given up using Arial Unicode MS and have a selection of other
Unicode fonts instead, including Gentium, FreeSerif, TITUS Cyberbit
Basic, and the new Unicode version of SIL Doulos. None of these have
problems similar to what you describe.

By the way, the case of ë is weird, since it's actually a basic Latin-1
character, so there should be no reason for Word to treat it in any
special way. Is it really U+00EB "small letter E with diaresis" you
mean? The other problematic character didn't come through here.

Maybe there is some more expert forum on internationalization or font
issues you could ask? Also, I guess it might be relevant to know what
versions of Word and Windows you're using? (Mine was Word2000 on XP).

Anyway, good luck with your work!

Lukas