A lot of people here are making comments along the lines of: "font rendering is uniquely terrible in Word."
While true, there is a setting for good kerning which is disabled by default for backwards compatibility reasons[1]. It's just so well hidden that I'm fairly certain that I'm one of maybe dozens of humans on the face of the planet using it.[2]
1. Go to the Styles ribbon control area and right-click the Normal style.
2. Select the Modify menu item.
3. Click the Format button in the bottom left.
4. Select the Font menu item.
5. Select the Advanced tab.
6. Tick the checkbox labelled "Kerning for fonts". Set the size to something small like "6 Points or above".
7. While you're here, turn on Ligatures. "Standard Only" is fine.
If the above doesn't make you breathe into a paper bag in a panic[3], also consider turning justification on so that we can use 5 GHz multi-core CPUs to finally catch up to the fancy paragraph layout algorithms introduced by this young chap called Gutenberg.[4] Any day now, Microsoft Word will catch up to the first moveable type printer ever made. Any day now...
[1] Backwards compatibility is not a good reason for new documents to use the 1990s defaults, but Microsoft doesn't care about your silly common sense and "logic", okay?
[2] There's dozens of us achieving good typography in Word, I tell you! Dozens!
[3] Some coworkers literally had a panic attack and made me revert the settings because they're "unauthorised" and not the defaults. I wish I was kidding.
Thank you for the tutorial! I don't mean to be greedy, but would you mind sharing your top MS Word typography tip that you think people should know? Aside from this one.
Turning on full justification and kerning do most of the heavy lifting.
The next biggest thing for most technical documents is maintaining the fidelity of drawings, diagrams, and charts. Many people paste low-resolution JPEGs into their documents, which looks like trash, especially on 4K screens or if printed.
Even older versions could paste in vector-format diagrams from other apps by using "Paste special -> Enhanced metafile".
Metafiles are the "native" vector format for the Windows GDI drawing and printing APIs, and provide the maximum quality and retain all of the original formatting details one-to-one. They're also small and efficient to display.
If none of those are possible, I insert images like company logos by scaling them up at the source to fill a 4K screen, take a screenshot, save as a PNG, and then insert that at a small size. This provides crisp edges at all but the most ludicrous resolutions.
While true, there is a setting for good kerning which is disabled by default for backwards compatibility reasons[1]. It's just so well hidden that I'm fairly certain that I'm one of maybe dozens of humans on the face of the planet using it.[2]
1. Go to the Styles ribbon control area and right-click the Normal style.
2. Select the Modify menu item.
3. Click the Format button in the bottom left.
4. Select the Font menu item.
5. Select the Advanced tab.
6. Tick the checkbox labelled "Kerning for fonts". Set the size to something small like "6 Points or above".
7. While you're here, turn on Ligatures. "Standard Only" is fine.
If the above doesn't make you breathe into a paper bag in a panic[3], also consider turning justification on so that we can use 5 GHz multi-core CPUs to finally catch up to the fancy paragraph layout algorithms introduced by this young chap called Gutenberg.[4] Any day now, Microsoft Word will catch up to the first moveable type printer ever made. Any day now...
[1] Backwards compatibility is not a good reason for new documents to use the 1990s defaults, but Microsoft doesn't care about your silly common sense and "logic", okay?
[2] There's dozens of us achieving good typography in Word, I tell you! Dozens!
[3] Some coworkers literally had a panic attack and made me revert the settings because they're "unauthorised" and not the defaults. I wish I was kidding.
[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Gutenber...