Font issues in Office v.X (specifically Word)

[Guy]

Dear all,

Further to my earlier post about equations (main part now hopefully
resolved), there remains the issue of fonts in Word/Office v.X and
special characters.

More specifically, the machine-program combination is not displaying
Greek letters already typed in the document, despite the fact that
they are available in my normal font set (TNR). Other characters that
are missing (so far as my investigations have gone) are some Polish
accented letters, the multiply sign (also available via my keyboard!)
and a combined Roman "III" character.

It seems the author has used a character set that I do not have. Of
course, I can just go in and replace them all with functional
versions, but that is a waste of time given that they all work fine on
Word 2000 for PC and my client is unlikely to appreciate the extra
time-input required.

I was pointed (by my client's IT unit) to the MS download centre for
extended font sets, but these are only for Word 2001 for Mac OS 8 & 9.

Is it possible to get a fully extended character set (e.g. Latin
extended A) for Word/Office v.X? If so, where? If not, is there any
other work-around other than asking my client for PDFs and re-keying
all such characters?

Thanks.

For additional information, I installed all the fonts I could find on
the CD (including TT on the Value Pack), and all the language tools as
well. The document concerned is supposedly using SimSun TT font, but
that seems to be only for Chinese characters and is therefore only a
residue of the originating program.

Thanks a lot.

Guy

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello Guy -

It sounds like you've been jammed into the midst of the Word X v. Unicode
conflict - you can win some of the battles but you're destined to lose the
war See John McGhie's excellent [albeit depressing] masterwork here;

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Unicode.html

As stated early on that page, upgrading to Office 2004 is the most effective
& painless cure.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Further to my earlier post about equations (main part now hopefully
resolved), there remains the issue of fonts in Word/Office v.X and
special characters.

Office v.X doesn't handle Unicode very well (only a subset, IIRC). You
may need to upgrade to Office 2004.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Dear all,

Further to my earlier post about equations (main part now hopefully
resolved), there remains the issue of fonts in Word/Office v.X and
special characters.

More specifically, the machine-program combination is not displaying
Greek letters already typed in the document, despite the fact that
they are available in my normal font set (TNR). Other characters that
are missing (so far as my investigations have gone) are some Polish
accented letters, the multiply sign (also available via my keyboard!)
and a combined Roman "III" character.

It seems the author has used a character set that I do not have. Of
course, I can just go in and replace them all with functional
versions, but that is a waste of time given that they all work fine on
Word 2000 for PC and my client is unlikely to appreciate the extra
time-input required.

I was pointed (by my client's IT unit) to the MS download centre for
extended font sets, but these are only for Word 2001 for Mac OS 8 & 9.

Is it possible to get a fully extended character set (e.g. Latin
extended A) for Word/Office v.X? If so, where? If not, is there any
other work-around other than asking my client for PDFs and re-keying
all such characters?

Thanks.

For additional information, I installed all the fonts I could find on
the CD (including TT on the Value Pack), and all the language tools as
well. The document concerned is supposedly using SimSun TT font, but
that seems to be only for Chinese characters and is therefore only a
residue of the originating program.

I think the answer may be expensive. Upgrade to Word 2004.

Word v.X had no Unicode support. It did use the Apple Extended
character set, which was an idiosyncratic mapping of some characters
onto the less used parts of the 8 bit character set. It was this that
gave us yen signs for round bullets when working cross platform.
Another trick it used, as you have discovered, are the so called CE and
CY fonts, which added a few more glyphs for Central European and
Cyrillic alphabets, by using an auxiliary font which mapped many
(8-bit) characters to different glyphs None of that is wonderfully
compatible with the Dark Side.

Word 2004 and current versions of Mac OS X and the Office 2004 font set
provide a far greater compatibility with fonts on Windows, but even the
Microsoft Unicode fonts such as Arial are still subsets of the enormous
supply of glyphs on fonts of similar names on Windows.

 

[Guy]

My thanks to CyberTaz, JE and Elliott.

Guy