Foreign language characters

[ray]

i have a number of documents which are written in a foreign language.
The document come up fine on my PC using Office 2003 but losed the
special characters when opening in the MAc's Office:x

The same respective font is loaded on both systems.

Any thoughts on how to resolve this?
Ray

 

[Elliott Roper]

i have a number of documents which are written in a foreign language.
The document come up fine on my PC using Office 2003 but losed the
special characters when opening in the MAc's Office:x

The same respective font is loaded on both systems.

Oh no it isn't. Well, Word v.X won't look at all the glyphs inside.
Only the ones that correspond to the ancient Macintosh 'extended'
character set, sometimes extended by the CE and CY variants of the
font, but not much. In any case v.X has no idea what to do with
Unicode's 16 bit characters unless they are in the first page that maps
to plain old 8-bit characters (and then only with the wind behind it.)

Any thoughts on how to resolve this?

Upgrade to Word 2004. It can deal with the Unicode furrin' stuff, but
Mac Office v.X can't.

Sorry, that is an expensive answer isn't it?

If you are a tight-fisted little monkey, and believe what you see on
the Microsoft MacBU people's blogs, there might be another one along in
a year or so. So the inexpensive answer is to steal a PC. You could
even buy one second hand with Office already on it for the cost of Mac
Office.

 

[nick]

Upgrade to Word 2004. It can deal with the Unicode furrin' stuff, but
Mac Office v.X can't.

True, but I find that Word 2004 doesn't always open Win Word files with
all characters intact -- I still see boxes instead of (e.g.) logical
symbols from time to time in files I get sent.

Sorry, that is an expensive answer isn't it?

If you are a tight-fisted little monkey, and believe what you see on
the Microsoft MacBU people's blogs, there might be another one along in
a year or so. So the inexpensive answer is to steal a PC. You could
even buy one second hand with Office already on it for the cost of Mac
Office.

You might try NeoOffice or OpenOffice instead (both free), or Mellel,
which is not free but inexpensive and is very good with rtf files (not
so much doc files) with Unicode characters.
I think the reason why Mellel sometimes deals with this better is that
if it can't find a character in the installed version of the font used
it automatically substitutes one from another font. So, as long as one
of the fonts on your Mac contains the right character, Mellel should
display it properly.
Caveat: none of OpenOffice, NeoOffice or Mellel supports all of Word's
features, so some other things (like Word fields) will not be displayed
properly. But at least you'll be able to read the text, formatted
more-or-less how it should be.

 

[nick]

Thanks for helping, Elliott.

Some PC fonts eg Arial contain many more glyphs than their Mac
counterparts.

I know -- I assumed that was the problem in fact, but then changing
font to one which I know has the right characters in, e.g. Lucida
Grande, should fix it. But it doesn't.

I would have thought the maths symbols would have made it through OK.
Do you have an example of a logic symbol that does not? Can you find it
by code using Character Palette?

In the last case I saw it was either the logical and, ∧, or the
logical or, ∨, character. I can't remember which one, but it was
sytematically replaced by a box all through the document. Other logical
symbols were ok in the same document.
I've seen it also with symbols used in modal logic - a box â–¡ and a
diamond â—‡. I use all of these characters in my own documents all the
time, entering them with the character palette or with a custom
keyboard shortcut. The problems only come when someone has written
something in PC Word that they want me to look at, eg to proofread an
exam. That's tricky when the symbols don't show up right!

 

[Elliott Roper]

Thanks for helping, Elliott.



I know -- I assumed that was the problem in fact, but then changing
font to one which I know has the right characters in, e.g. Lucida
Grande, should fix it. But it doesn't.

Hmm. It turns out to be an interesting one. Lucida Grande has neither
'and' nor 'or' on either of my machines. (It is not every day you can
write that and have it make sense)

There are very few fonts here that *do* include those characters. One
of them is MS Mincho, whose description as shown in Font Book includes
"this version of MS Mincho is prepared from (sic) Mac Office"

Now, if I include { SYMBOL 0x2227 \f"MS Mincho" \u } in my test Word
document, It produces a box with an X in it.
However, I can insert that character (LOGICAL AND) into Word from the
Character palette, *and* Word admits that it is in MS Mincho is the
font menu (or at any rate it says MS and something else in Japanese
looking script)
I'm pretty sure the symbol field is correct syntactically, since it
correctly produces an E if I change 2227 to 45.

I think it looks like a bug in Word.
I don't suppose you could discover the hex value of the AND and OR
characters as they arrived from the PC version. Select the character
then ask character palette to "Show character selected in application"
-- you will find that magic spell beneath the little gear on the bottom
left of character palette's main window. Be warned that character
palette does not want to play with characters inserted into Word with
the symbol field.

In the last case I saw it was either the logical and, ?, or the
logical or, ?, character. I can't remember which one, but it was
sytematically replaced by a box all through the document. Other logical
symbols were ok in the same document.
I've seen it also with symbols used in modal logic - a box ? and a
diamond ?. I use all of these characters in my own documents all the
time, entering them with the character palette or with a custom
keyboard shortcut. The problems only come when someone has written
something in PC Word that they want me to look at, eg to proofread an
exam. That's tricky when the symbols don't show up right!

I'll say it is. That is seriously out of order. I'll put a report
together and feedback it up to Microsoft. To make it convincing, I'd
appreciate your result to the test above, or you could email me a PC
Word doc with those symbols in it. Change nospam to elliott in the
sender address.