Issue with footnote sizing and gaps between sentences

As you can see from http://www.identifont.com/find?font=baskerville&q=Go, there are a lot of Baskerville fonts. The BT indicates Bitstream, and I have no idea where I got it, though the likelihood is that it was installed with some Corel product, as I see it is listed in the fonts provided by my Corel Graphics software.

You can purchase the Baskerville BT font family (four variants) for $98, but if you google for "Baskerville free," you can find sites that offer one or another type of Baskerville for free download. Some of these sites are undoubtedly dodgy, but Font Squirrel offers Libre Baskerville, which has an Open Font License (free for personal use). You might try that to see whether you experience the same problem. There's no guarantee the font metrics would be the same, so there might be some changes in line and page breaks. Another caveat: although the page seems to offer three styles (regular, italic, and bold--the bold italic would be synthesized by Word), the specimen pages show only regular and italic.

Another site (https://www.downloadfonts.io/baskerville-font-family-free/) also claims regular, italic, and bold for Libre Baskerville and it's available at https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Libre+Baskerville as well.

Dear Suzanne,

Ok, thats helpful thanks. I could use Baskerville BT - any guidance on where to get it? I can't see it in my font list.

Best,

George

As I said, I do notice this in Baskerville Old Face, so it is a problem associated with that font (and I agree that it is not desirable). Can you use a different font? As I mentioned, I don't see the problem with Baskerville BT, which is very similar.

Thanks for this all! Regarding the character style issue, I'm not sure if I'm word-literate to have followed exactly, but I think the character style is "Default Paragraph Font + Superscript." I would be interested in what you think actually - I personally didn't notice a problem with the footnote size, but my examiners felt the default 12 + superscript was too small. I have attached an image of the styles pane and a paragraph with the default footnotes for reference. 

Meanwhile I will have a go at changing the line spacing.

The problem is that "Multiple" line spacing (including Single and Double) allows for increasing the spacing for larger point sizes, raised and lowered characters, and so on. The only solution, as Stefan has pointed out, is to use "Exactly" line spacing. I usually do this for double spacing, anyway, since I find Double spacing too spacey for most font sizes. For 12-point text, I use 24-point line-spacing for double spacing.

But I'm curious about the footnote reference formatting issue. Check the Footnote Reference character style: it should be defined as "Default Paragraph Font + Superscript." Word creates superscripts by proportionally reducing font size and raising the character some proportional amount (all this happens behind the scenes and is not documented anywhere, so the proportions are not known), but it appears this is not working as expected in your Baskerville. I don't see this here with Baskerville BT, but I do see it with Baskerville Old Face.