An image demonstrating the problems is at: http://screencast.com/t/bMbVQ2rn
And the sample report is attached.
The fonts are TrueType fonts. In bold, a space before the number 1 vanishes when previewed at 100% (for Arial Narrow) but comes back when increasing the zoom size even slightly.
For another TT font (Gil Sans MT Condensed in bold), the space vanishes even for higher zoom settings.
A discussion of a similar issue at Problem with TTF font in Crystal reports for VS2010 doesn't provide a solution.
Note that both Crystal Designer (where the font is rendered with proper spacing) as well as the WinForm app (where the font spacing issue is present) load the same pair of usp10.dll files (according to the modules utility). See image showing this at: 2015-01-20_1947 - IdoMillet's libraryhttp://screencast.com/t/i05lV3ypm3
Added image showing usp10.dll versions loaded by Crystal Designer and the application are the same.