My Scrunched Text Bug Report

This morning when I tried to print a document, all the letters
scrunched toward the left margin.

The scrunching happened to Body Text; It did not happen to Heading 1-3
or to Normal+9pt, or to an Equation Editor object. It does happen to
Normal.

I was in Normal View at the time.

The printer was an HP LaserJet 4M+. The printer drivers were the
ordinary Windows XP drivers.

The printer was off-line when I told Word to print; I pushed the
on-line button later.

Word version is Word 2002 SP3. Macros are disabled.

The scrunching occurred both on screen and when printed.

The document was new, just created by pasting pieces from another
document.The document is mostly simple; there is nothing in headers or
footers, no endnotes, footnotes, comments, tracked changes, numbers or
bullets. There is one Equation Editor object and two small tables. The
table in Body Text style had the text in each cell scrunched; the
table in Normal+9pt did not have scrunched text.

I started trying things.

Once this had happened, any new document created was also scrunched.
So far I have left this Word session open so as not to disturb things.

Each paragraph is scrunched separately. The entire paragraph
compresses to a few letters long on one line. If there is a manual
line break, the scrunched line breaks and each part scrunches.

I pulled down the Styles and Formatting Task Pane and modified Body
Text style to use Verdana instead of Times New Roman, and it
unscrunched. I changed it back and it scrunched again.

Printing it while it was set for Palatino Linotype resulted in normal
behavior. When I then changed it back to TNR it scrunched again.

More checking reveals that it apparently happens with any style or
direct format that uses TNR at 12 points not bold or italic. Changing
any of these things unscrunches it. Changing color does not unscrunch
it.Underlining does not unscrunch it.

Changing alignment to Center is very interesting. For one-line
paragraphs this effectively unscrunches them (and centers them of
course). For longer paragraphs it reduces the scrunching so that the
paragraph is more-or-less evenly distributed across the length on one
line. I say more-or-less because it is a little more scrunched on the
right than on the left.

Setting the alignment to Justified produces the identical result for
the long paragraphs; this ought to be a clue. Short paragraphs are
unscrunched in this setting.

Right alignment just scrunches the text to the right edge.

Setting Wrap to Window does not unscruch it.

It does not happen to new documents in WordPad, so I guess the on-disk
font is OK. If I copy the scrunched document to the clipboard and
paste it into WordPad, it is not scrunched. If I try to print from
WordPad it does not scrunch.

Bob S