I'm sorry if I wasn't explicit enough. I thought I addressed Stefan's question in my first paragraph. It is not an Adobe Reader display issue, as the OP had originally investigated and stated. Multiple PDF readers, Adobe or not, all exhibit the same behavior, at any magnification, and it persists when the PDF is printed. In short, the reader is faithfully reproducing what Word gave it.

The underlying cause of the problem in Word is well known and acknowledged by Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...screen-in-word. Word seems to enforce a white border around each line. When an exact line spacing is specified that tightens the vertical spacing (brings the lines closer together), that border can obscure portions of the characters in the line, because they are on a layer behind the border.

The question I am asking (and perhaps I should have started a new thread?) was if anyone had found a viable workaround for this. The solutions offered by MS in the referenced post (Methods 3 & 4 ... the first two only affect the on-screen display, and have no impact on PDF output) both require changing the look/layout/style of the document. If the current font, fixed line spacing, etc. must be preserved to match the remainder of the existing document, is there any way to accomplish this when a line or two in the paragraph contain characters in a larger point size than the surrounding text?