Real typographers use Quark or InDesign, but some of us still care about typography even if we're stuck with Word for our jobs. I gave Word 2008 a spin at the Apple store to see what's changed concerning typography, and here's what I found:
-Word 2008 does support ligatures. As reported elsewhere, it either applies to the whole document or none of it; you can't turn ligatures on/off for selected text like you can from Apple's standard Cocoa typography panel.
The ligatures supported seem to correspond to OpenType's "common ligatures." When I tried it with Hoefler Text and Minion Pro, ligatures such as fi, fl, and ffi all worked. The OT "discretionary ligatures" (e.g. st) did not.
-Word 2004 only supported kerning with Mac formatted fonts; it didn't work for OpenType or Windows TrueType fonts. This has been fixed. Unfortunately, there's a new bug: If you have ligature support on, kerning doesn't work, regardless of font format.
-When using OT or Windows TT fonts, the font menu in Word 2004 displayed every font in the family separately (e.g. Perpetua, Perpetua bold, Perpetua italic.) This has been fixed; each family appears once, with a submenu for all fonts in the family, including weights other than regular/bold (e.g. for Gill Sans it shows light as well).
Furthermore, the top of the font menu now includes both OS X-wide font collections and a recently used font section, which makes it easier to get to the font that you want.
-Word still does not support live font updating. If you activate/deactivate a font or collection, you have to restart the program for the changes to register. (Note that deactivated collections are properly hidden by the new collections menu.)
-OpenType support is still abysmal. Specifically: (1) The "small caps" button still gives faux small caps, even if you're using an OT font with true small caps. (2) You can't choose between old style figures and lining numerals in OT fonts that have both; you're stuck with the font's default. (3) You can't circumvent any of these problems with the OS X character palette; although the palette works, if you try to insert something from the "alternate glyphs" feature, it says that the application doesn't support them. These things are inexcusable. MS helped develop OT what, almost 10 years ago, and they still don't support it in either the Mac or Windows version of Word?
-Apple may have tinkered with the fonts on its machines in the store, but it looks like Palatino Linotype is not included with Office 2008. It looks like Perpetua now is; it wasn't in Office 2004.
So, the bottom line is: Things have gotten better, but they still aren't how they should be. Isn't that typical for MS's Mac products?
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