Font changes in email attached Word Doc

[Brian]

I have a Word XP user and a Word 2003 user trading revisions of a document
that has a running table that spans several pages as well as headers and
footers. The first page footer contains mostly arial characters but also has
4 wingding characters for checkboxes. Occasionally when one of these
documents gets attached to an email, the line preceeding the first wingding
checkbox shows up as wingding when it is supposed to be arial. This messes
up the formatting of the entire document. Any idea why this happens? Any
recommendations about how to avoid this issue?

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Brian,

I have a Word XP user and a Word 2003 user trading revisions of a document
that has a running table that spans several pages as well as headers and
footers. The first page footer contains mostly arial characters but also has
4 wingding characters for checkboxes. Occasionally when one of these
documents gets attached to an email, the line preceeding the first wingding
checkbox shows up as wingding when it is supposed to be arial. This messes
up the formatting of the entire document. Any idea why this happens? Any
recommendations about how to avoid this issue?

The Word binary file format (*.doc) is notoriously unstable. A "hiccup" in
transmission (whether network or email) can wipe out the entire document
(document corruption). One way to protect documents from this kind of glitch is
to ZIP them before transmission.

In this case, however, I'm guessing that the document already has a bit of
damage in the header/footer storage, or possibly in that single paragraph mark
that's causing the intermittent problem.

One thing you could try is to CUT the entire footer section then use Paste
Special as UNFORMATTED text to put it back in. Re-apply the formatting. If the
problem was in the paragraph mark this should stabilize things.

If the problem is in the header/footer storage, then you may need to zap the
section break at the end of the section that contains this header/footer. To
tell you how to do that, we need to know whether this document contains more
than one section and in which section(s) the problem is occurring?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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