Outline size differences

I recently had the following occurrence and am looking for information.

I was finalizing a Quark v6.1 doc for printing at a commercial press after the
doc was transferred to me from editorial. Fonts loaded fine and there were no
flags. I made a PDF of the doc and printed it on our postscript laser printer;
again, no font problems or flags. Comparing the pages I printed from PDF to the
proof pages I was given by editorial, printed from Quark, I noticed that after
about 50 pages the text had reflowed. I went compared the fonts I had loaded
with the fonts that came with the job and found that they were all identical in
version (and, of course, publisher) except that one loaded font had a different
"outline size" than the font which came with the job (i.e., an outline
size of 34772 rather than 34773). When I switched this one font, the text flow
on the two sets of pages became identical.

You don't say explicitly, but I'm going to assume from your mention of
"outline size" that you are using a Type 1 font (a.k.a.
"PostScript"), and that the "outline size" is the size of
the LWFN file, the scalable font outlines, which are a separate file from the
font suitcase. Assuming all that is true....

No, outline size is independent of kerning. But the different outline size is a
suggestion that there is something different between the fonts. Somebody could
have modified a font without changing the version string, for example. Also, the
base character widths are present in the outline font (and also in the suitcase,
if memory serves).

Regards,