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so if you were using a font with kerning information, Word would just ignore it by default? Astounding.

Yes you had to manually turn kerning and ligatures on in the second tab of the font dialog. And you had to select all the text you wanted to enable it for first. Needless to say, pretty much nobody did it.

Why would you try to create a document in word that "looks good". There are a million problems with using word for typesetting/document design and font rendering is the least of them.

It’s not so much about creating beautiful documents, it’s more about making the world a more beautiful place.

Everyone uses Word. I have to stare at Word documents all the time. Why can’t I be happy when they look a bit better?

It's okay, you can be happy.

Document rendering is much improved in general ...