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I'm currently work on text, which intented to be read on screen. For that reason, body text should be quite large, 15-16 points.

I use both InDesign CS6 and Word 2016 for this project.

As I discovered, at some specific sizes, serifed OpenType fonts looks different in InDesign and Word. I don't understand why. (Any help is welcome).

I tested with Adobe Minion Pro, Adobe Arno Pro, Adobe Garamond Premiere Pro and Monotype Times New Roman (the last is TTF, shipped with Windows).

Picture 1: InDesign CS6. Top - Minion Pro, bottom - Times New Roman. There are no problems here, both fonts looks good in all sizes.

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Picture 2: Word 2016 (or recent LibreOffice Writer, no difference). Top - Minion Pro, bottom - Times New Roman. As you can see, at 16 points Minion dramatically increases it's thickness.

enter image description here

Summary: TTF fonts - looks good at all sizes. OTF fonts - increases it's thickness at 16 points and above.

Why I have such unpleasant look in Word and LibreOffice? How I could fix it?

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4 Answers 4

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InDesign is professional page layout software made by Adobe. Word is developed by Microsoft, and Libre Office is Open Source software is developed by the Document Foundation, and they are word processors, not layout software.

It's really a bit too much to expect software built by completely different companies to render fonts on screen exactly the same, even more so when comparing software that serves completely different purposes.

What you could try, which might help a bit, is to export PDFs from each of these applications and compare those, rather than taking screen shots. I suspect there will be little difference between them if they are all in the same format, and viewed using the same software, such as Adobe Reader.

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Different software will render the same fonts differently and you can probably expect to get the best rendering with InDesign as it is a professional design tool. I don't think there's anything to fix here, this is how each software will display font files.

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  • Thanks. Well, then I have one another side-question. Does this issue mean, that using 15-16 points OTF fonts in Word/LibreOffice is problematic? (Have someone faced with described problem, except me?).
    – user90726
    Aug 22, 2017 at 10:46
  • There really is no problem. This is the reality of existing software. Use InDesign and the "problem" goes away i guess? :)
    – Lucian
    Aug 22, 2017 at 13:34
  • In general this problem is a "display" problem. When printed usually all software produce the same result. This is because printers have much higher resolution than the screen which means they don't have to approximate how a font look - which removes all the differences. This also means that fonts look more similar between Word and InDesign on a high res display (for example retina displays)
    – slebetman
    Aug 22, 2017 at 14:45
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There is one diference between a print project and an electronic project.

A printed project is delivered as a finished product. The decisions on what paper, how the colors are delivered, the final coatings... all are included there.

An electronic project is not a finished one. They are the "instructions", the blueprints, the recipy on how to re-create it on screen. Yes, you have the information there, but each program has its own "flavour".

So every program wil render your file diferently, on a diferent operating system, diferent program, same program but diferent version or even the same program, same version but with specific configuration by the user.

Not even a PDF will look the same. Some will use Adobe Reader, some will see it on the web browser with some library, some will see it on a phone, etc.

You need to understand that in order to live a less stressed life making electronic documents. n_n

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It's possible that Word is making some kind of correction to help you see what you're doing more clearly with smaller fonts. Try printing this or exporting to PDF and see if the problem is still there.

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