Posted by: John Hudson
There are a couple of issues at play here:
MS Word uses font metrics to determine default linespacing, and since different fonts have different metrics, reflecting taller or shorter total heights of tallest and deepest glyphs, the linespacing may change whenever you switch fonts in mid-text. The best way to deal with this -- actually, the best way to deal with any text in Word -- is not to allow the program to set the default linespacing, but instead manually control the linespacing by setting an exact value. You can do this in the Paragraph options, via the Format menu (I'm trying to remember this, because I'm using Word 2007 now, which has a different UI).
In the Paragraph options, select the 'Indents and Spacing' tab, and then locate the 'Line spacing' option (halfway down on the right). You can set the linepacing to be multiples of the default linespacing (single, double, 1.5 etc.), which is fine if you don't want to pay too much attention to formatting paragraphs. But the best control is available if you select Exact, and then, in the 'At' field, enter a value in typographic points. So, for example, if you were setting a paragraph of 12pt text, you might set the linespacing to 15pt.
Setting an exact linespacing should also solve the clipping problem you reported. This is a complex issue involving the way in which Word calculates the linespacing relative to device metrics in the font. I've been over this issue with the folk at Microsoft Typography, and they've been very helpful in identifying the problem, but so far I have not come up with a font-side solution that would not involved reflowing all existing Word documents using the font, which I want to avoid. But if the user sets an exact linespacing value, then Word should not clip the tall glyphs, because it won't be trying to calculate the linespacing based on font metrics.