Tools: Problems with Word's font display

[Geoff hart <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

I'm currently working with several clients in Japan to edit their files
(scientific manuscripts destined for peer-reviewed journals). At the request
of the person who sends me the files, I'm using Word97 and its Mac sibling
Word98 to do the editing with revision tracking turned on. On the whole,
it's a fairly painless process, but one recurring problem makes the job much
harder than it needs to be: something almost always goes wrong with the word
spacing. It doesn't seem to affect the files to the extent that the original
author has problems reading the edited file, but it drives me batty.

The problem? Words run together to the point that it's difficult (and
sometimes impossible) to see whether they're separate words; as you can
understand, that's a problem when I'm editing. I know that the words are
separate because I can hop the cursor over to the start of each of the two
words, but that's awfully time-consuming, and it makes reading the files
very uncomfortable. Switching between fully justified and ragged right
doesn't help, nor does changing the zoom % so the text is larger. I've
considered selecting all the text and changing it to one of my preferred
system fonts, but I suspect that doing so would mess up the many symbols in
the file.

Has anyone encountered (and resolved) this kind of problem? Any suggestions
gratefully accepted.

--Geoff Hart, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca