Fonts and retaining formatting in Word for Mac

[Dan Smith]

I am a Windows user but have a client who has a new I-Mac and Word v. X for
Mac. She has a couple of problems aside from not knowing much about the
software in general.

1. When I visited last, when she selected a from the dropdown menu, the font
that resulted was not the font selected. It said it was, but it actually
displayed a different font. I thought we fixed that by regenerating
normal.dot, but that turns out to only have fixed it for new documents. If
she opens a new document, the problem returns.

Can we fix existing documents by copying them all but the last section break
into a new, blank document based on a different template and then applying
fonts and styles?

2. She creates documents that need to hold their fonts (she's in marketing)
when she transfers them to clients. In Windows, there is an option to embed
fonts when saving, but I have not been able to find that in her version of
Word. Does that capability exist for the Mac? If not, does someone have an
idea about how she might retain formatting and fonts when transferring a
completed product to a client using Word in a Windows environment? She's
going to have to find a way for stuff she creates to be truly compatible in
the Windows environment.

Sorry to be working so blind here, but I'm really trying to help another
small business owner who's having a difficult time of it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Elliott Roper]

I am a Windows user but have a client who has a new I-Mac and Word v. X for
Mac. She has a couple of problems aside from not knowing much about the
software in general.

1. When I visited last, when she selected a from the dropdown menu, the font
that resulted was not the font selected. It said it was, but it actually
displayed a different font. I thought we fixed that by regenerating
normal.dot, but that turns out to only have fixed it for new documents. If
she opens a new document, the problem returns.

That was an old problem that went away with the service update of
Word/new version of OS X - can't remember which. You would get a font
one or two away in the list. Try googling the group. You will probably
find that stopping and restarting Word will make it go away for a
little while without recourse to template molesting. Get her to report
what she sees in "about this mac" in the blue apple menu and "about
word" in the "word" menu next door.

Can we fix existing documents by copying them all but the last section break
into a new, blank document based on a different template and then applying
fonts and styles?

As a general rule, that is a recommended way of taming documents that
go feral. In this case, probably no help at all. Get a later OS X and
the Word updater properly installed.

2. She creates documents that need to hold their fonts (she's in marketing)
when she transfers them to clients. In Windows, there is an option to embed
fonts when saving, but I have not been able to find that in her version of
Word. Does that capability exist for the Mac? If not, does someone have an
idea about how she might retain formatting and fonts when transferring a
completed product to a client using Word in a Windows environment? She's
going to have to find a way for stuff she creates to be truly compatible in
the Windows environment.

One of my favourite peeves. There is no font embed. The only way is to
carefully check the same versions of the fonts used are on both
machines, and that you have very similar printers at each location.
Modern PC fonts are partially handled my Mac OS X and Word. If you
stick with the fonts that come with Word it is not too bad.
Microsoft/Apple implementation of off-the-base unicode characters is
woeful. The unicode glyph only works when it is also in Apple's
extended character set. Expect your bullet points to become yen signs
at particular phases of the moon.

Sorry to be working so blind here, but I'm really trying to help another
small business owner who's having a difficult time of it.

We are all working blind in this area. If the end user has no need to
change the copy, and there are no eps files in the document then print
to PDF and send that. If I want the recipient to know what it looked
like when it left, yet he still wants to edit it, I send the doc and
the pdf. Then one of us becomes the layout artist of last resort.

If I were trying for good typography and portability, I'd place the
contents in an InDesign 2 document and send its PDF. There comes a
point of pernicketiness where no version of Word can do the typography
well enough. Exporting to InDesign 2 is remarkably painless. It is
downright beautiful for getting the last bits of your paragraphs and
pages looking good. There are not that many people with InDesign
collaborative skills, and not even its mum thinks it is a good base for
maintaining the content of large documents.

There are other PC-to-Mac-and-back bugs/incompatibilities with track
changes and comments.

The sad truth is that Word for Mac and Word for PC are not suitable
companions for collaborative projects.

The last time I whined about all this, I was told all the great ways
that later features in later versions of PC Word had fewer problems
with each other and that some of them might go away in the next version
of Word for Macintosh. I'm hanging in there and hoping John's right.

The sane choice is to go over to the dark side completely if you are
collaborating with PC users. Me, I gave up on sanity long ago, and keep
hoping they will buy Macs, or that Apple and Microsoft will one day get
together to make a merchantable office product. (there will be a flock
of flying pigs pictured on the box) In the meantime, I make do with
PDF+Word or InDesign for finals. Plus a whole bunch of tricks for
de-natured track changes. I'm not that great at layout, but I'm 10
times better than most of the people I work with, so I end up as
composer of last resort. It is particularly galling when another
colleague is the apostrophe police, another is the spelling cop, and
there is a special branch for double quote marks. It's tough being the
widows, orphans, margins and hanging puctuation stasi round here.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Elliott:

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Wed, 09 Jul 2003

The sad truth is that Word for Mac and Word for PC are not suitable
companions for collaborative projects.

I agree.

The last time I whined about all this, I was told all the great ways
that later features in later versions of PC Word had fewer problems
with each other and that some of them might go away in the next version
of Word for Macintosh. I'm hanging in there and hoping John's right.

The next version of Word on the Mac will be a lot better (those who know are
not allowed to tell us, those who tell us don't know -- you figure out which
one of those I am...). I suggest that all the "unexpected/wrong/unavailable
character problems will go away for the vast majority of us.

On the PC, you have the ability to "Embed" fonts in the document, which
gives you an easy way around the "unavailable fonts" problem.
Unfortunately, the Mac does not support font embedding, never has, and I
know of no plans to change that. If you receive a document with embedded
fonts on the Mac, the fonts will stay embedded, but the Mac can't use them.

The "doesn't print properly" problems are not ours. Mac Word simply hands
the document off to OS X and says "Here, you, print this!". So you tell me
whether Apple intends to improve its printing mechanism in OS 10.3 and I
will tell you whether or not Word will print better One problem seems
to be printer manufacturers are not up to speed with their Mac printer
drivers yet. That should change soon.

VBA is not totally compatible between the versions: Mac Word does not
implement the whole of PC VBA. That is not likely to change in the next
version, and the reason for that is that VBA is a dead technology due to the
impossibility of securing it properly. The whole of Microsoft (including PC
Word) is going over to the Common Language Runtime (VB dot-Net to you and I)
and that will come to the Mac too, presumably at the same time as the PC
gets it (it's still a year or so away).

The sane choice is to go over to the dark side completely if you are
collaborating with PC users. Me, I gave up on sanity long ago, and keep
hoping they will buy Macs, or that Apple and Microsoft will one day get
together to make a merchantable office product.

The *big* news in the next version of PC Word, which I am beta testing right
now, is that it fully supports XML. The whole purpose of XML is to be
cross-platform and cross-application. That's why it was created. It is not
going to automatically solve cross-platform problems, but it will give us
the tools to be able to do so for ourselves. Is XML coming to Mac Word? I
actually don't know, but I would be shocked and amazed if it did not. I
can't see any reason why it shouldn't.

It is particularly galling when another
colleague is the apostrophe police, another is the spelling cop, and
there is a special branch for double quote marks. It's tough being the
widows, orphans, margins and hanging puctuation stasi round here.

But it fits so well with your tactful, charming nature

Cheers

Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Elliott:

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Thu, 10 Jul 2003

That's a pity to hear that bad news. I have Freehand, Flash, a
timed-out InDesign 2 trial and none of them have heard of this
restriction. I think you mean that Mac does not use Microsoft's version
of font embedding. Fonts have been a running sore ever since
pointy-clicky computers were invented. All the evidence suggests it
ain't getting better any time soon.

Hmmm... Now *I* sit corrected. I was told that the reason we did not have
it was because "The OS doesn't support it." But you could be right: "it"
might have meant "the Microsoft way of doing it."

True, but half the whinges on this list are people with printers that
do their margins right on everything but Word. That is almost certainly
a coincidence.

I think what causes many of them is that in Word, they expose the ability to
format the document for a generic printer as well as for the default
printer. This was supposed to give users greater flexibility: but it just
gives ME the flexibility to have the margins go wrong half the time...

That is good news. Does that mean we will see a general purpose CLR
interpreter as part of Office on the Mac? That would be *very* useful.

I understand that that is the intention. It's a separate application (The
..Net Framework) that you install, and any dot-netty stuff can then find it
and run it. Because it's a dedicated application, they can rigidly enforce
trusts and permissions and a sandbox with 36-foot-high walls with
electrified barbed wire at the top

Loooks like I'll have to buy Office 12 as well as 11. Can you hint how
close 11 is yet?

No... I will be the last to know -- but you might start hosing down your
kids expectations of getting a PlayStation this Christmas

That is a great step forward, particularly if the DTDs and schemas for
document formats are open.

Last I heard, Word was not going to support DTDs unless you attached them
yourself. It will use them if you have them, but it won;t make them. It
DOES support roll-your-own Schemas, and these are more powerful than DTDs,
so I don;t think we will miss DTDs.

Cheers
Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]