mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) (05/25/89)
In a couple of earlier postings, I described how character spacing in printed documents changes with each release of the Macintosh operating system. (Strange, but true.) Yesterday I mentioned this problem to a friend of mine who, among other things, writes printer drivers for the Mac. He tells me that the problem is the fault of Microsoft Word, even though the symptom occurred when only the OS was changed (i.e. keeping the same binary copy of Word). He says Microsoft modifies fields in records which affect the appearance of printed documents, even though the documentation from Apple explicitly warns programmers not to touch these fields. He says most other editors, such as FullWrite, do not have these problems because they play by the rules. So it seems I owe Apple an apology. Although I haven't confirmed it personally, it appears that the problem can be solved by switching to another vendor of word processing software. That might be necessary anyway, because it seems that Microsoft Word has finally grown beyond the complexity which Microsoft can handle. There were nearly 50 external beta releases of Word 4.0 before it came out.