Re: kerning. It is true that Word has a special kerning function, which typically would be used for extremely large font sizes.
I believe - am not an expert but did my own test on this - that it DOES kern automatically somewhat.
Try this experiment. Using Word Times New Roman at the largest font size available - mine is 72 point - center justify and type the word "moon" (no quotation marks), hit enter, and then type "mono" (no quotation marks). If the program doesn't adjust the spacing, the words should be the same length. They're not.
Moon is a tiny bit longer than mono. (It doesn't matter whether you capitalize the first "m" or not, but do it the same way both times.)
Hugh Hewitt's guest expert, Robert "Corky" Cartwright, Professor of Computer Science at Rice, explains why.
http://www.hughhewitt.com/#postid876
Admittedly, you can adjust the spacing between the letters even more if you use the "kerning" function.
> ... it {MS Word} DOES kern automatically somewhat.
"Moon" is not a revealing test for kerning. You want to
use letter pairs that could nest - have their character
cells overlap, but avoid glyphs touching.
"Yo" or "To" might be more revealing. If kerned, the
upper right arm of the "Y" or "T" will hang over part
of the "o".
I use Adobe FrameMaker, not Word, and can't run the tests.
Several DTP-expert contributors on the SBVFT site
dispute that kerning is present. It would not be wise
to hang much of the forgery charge on it until default
kerning in MS Word, and the presence of clear kerning
in the documents is definitely proved.
The top part from the August 1 memo doesn't appear to be kerned. The bottom part from the August 18 memo does appear to be kerned. Perhaps it is due to artifacts from the copy process. I think the MS Word document that matches it exactly was made with kerning turned off (the default)
All applications on today's computers use kerning. What people call kerning in a word processor is simply a programmatic feature which allows the user to override the automatic settings.