Advice: tightening line spacing on my font?

I've made a couple of fonts that are distributed through Fedora;
today, someone pointed out that Essays1743 has really wide line
spacing.  (*) Essays is based on a particular book from 1743, whose
lines are *much* closer together than that--in OpenOffice, I have to
set the paragraph spacing to about 75% to get something reasonable.  I
want to fix this, but I'm concerned about people's existing documents
getting messed up.

What do you guys think? (I thought this would be a good group of
people to talk about the installed base of a font.)

(*) A sample document: http://www.thibault.org/fonts/essays/Sample.pdf

[Dave Crossland]

Hi!

There is no easy answer - vertical metrics are always tradeoffs, and
since your font supports Vietnamese diacritics which are very tall -
see attached viet.png - then the vertical metrics around the 'plain'
Latin glyphs - see attached latin.png - are seemingly too tall.

But if you adjust the vertical metrics, the vietnamese glyphs will be
clipped on some systems.

My colleague at Google Web Fonts, Raph Levien, did some research on
this which is published here:

http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/w/edit/VerticalMetricsRecommend...

Cheers
Dave

> But if you adjust the vertical metrics, the vietnamese glyphs will be
> clipped on some systems.

Oh, good point.  I could try making the double accents smaller, I suppose.
> My colleague at Google Web Fonts, Raph Levien, did some research on
> this which is published here:

Thanks, I'll read it.

...though that was the edit link, which gives me a 403.  For anybody else who needs it, here's the read-only link:

http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/wiki/VerticalMetricsRecommendat...