When I've seen similar behaviour with other programs, it's been a font question. Do you also get letters too close together in some individual words, or just spaces falling out between words? all I can suggest is that you experiment with a couple of other fonts and see if that helps.
As for the cover … printing a black background wastes an awful lot of toner, and many printers (physical devices, not guys at the repro shop) can't print to the edge of the paper anyway.