MS Word document printed to pdf via Ghostscript PDF and GSview 4.9 to convert to pdf. Any line which contains a degree symbol as in 17'deg'C places the C to close to 'deg' and a space mid word elsewhere in the line. I can provide an example if I knew how to attach it!
Created attachment 4441 [details] Original Word document
Created attachment 4442 [details] Generated postscript file
Created attachment 4443 [details] Converted pdf file
I think this may be due to the font not being embedded. When you open the file in Acrobat, you can see the reported difference. If you open the file in Ghostscript, however, you can't. Now if you check the properties in Acrobat you can see that the font being used by Acrobat is not Helvetica, its 'ArialMT'. Of course when rendered using GS, the Helvetica font used to render the PDF file is the same as the Helvetica font used to create the PDF file, so the two match. Most likely the width of one of the glyphs in the string is different in the Helvetica being used by Ghostscript and the ArialMT being used by Acrobat. Note that pdfwrite isn't emitting a /Widths array for this font, presumably because its a standard font, whereas Distiller does. I note also that Distiller (as usual) re-encodes the font to WinAnsi... At the moment I can't seem to persuade GS to embed the font for me, I'm unsure why but I suspect this would solve the problem.
This is yet another case of non-standard font metrics in URW fonts bundled with Ghostscript. Ghostscript converts the file just fine when it uses real Helvetica. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 687297 ***