Curly Quotes and Apostrophe substitution problem

M

MacDuffee

A friend of mine has written a book. He emailed me the manuscript and all of
the curly quotes and apostrophes have been substituted. See below:

AMommy?@
AYes, dear.@
AWhen I grow up, I want to be a pilot.@
AI=m sorry son, but that=s not possible. You=ll have to choose one or the
other.@
-Anon

As you can see the begin quote is a capital A, the end quote is a @
character and the apostrophe is the = character. Further on in the document
the single quote is substituted with the > character. I first thougth this
was a problem between his Windows version and my Mac version but I had him
send it to a friend of mine who is running the same version (Word Office
2003) with the same results.

Can anyone help me? I assume there is a setting he needs to change.

Thanks
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

This substitution is most commonly seen when the document was created in
WordPerfect and used the WP Typographic Symbols font for quotes, dashes,
etc.
 
M

MacDuffee

Susan,
Thanks so much for the quick reply! I found out that he began this book in
WP about four three years ago but has been using Word for the past three
years. Is there a way to convert those symbols to something more universal
on his end? I could do a simple find and replace except for the capital A for
the begin quote, that may cause a bunch of problems. He did say that he has
sent this to Kinkos and they had no problem printing it out without the
substitutions. Is there a way to modify my application to recognize the
symbols?

Thanks again and Happy New Year.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

The only way to get your computer to see these correctly is to install the
WP Typographic Symbols font. I'll warn you that the symbols will then be
identical (and rather ugly) in any font.

It's usually worth the trouble to do a Replace operation. If you're very
lucky, the symbols, when selected, will actually show as being in WP
Typographic Symbols. If so, you may be able to refine your search by
searching for just capital A in that font (which you'd have to type in
manually, so I can't promise it would work). You might also try copying and
pasting one into the "Find what" box. You may find that when you do that, it
displays as some weird symbol, but Find will actually find it.
 

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