HELP! Greek symbols in WinWord not translating

[el]

I'm working in Mac Word v.10.1.4 opening WinWord files that have heavy
use of greek math symbols in text. I've opened several dozens of
similar files without problems until yesterday, when only SOME of the
symbols (not always the same ones either) come across. The others are
showing up on the Mac as "_"

I've tried rtf files but Word "unexpetedly quits" on trying to open.

I tried opening the files in TextEdit with automatic encoding, without
satisfactory results.

anyone have a suggestion? This is a huge project and it's important
that I solve this QUICKLY!

Thanks very much in addvance,
Lee

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I'm working in Mac Word v.10.1.4 opening WinWord files that have heavy
use of greek math symbols in text.

anyone have a suggestion? This is a huge project and it's important
that I solve this QUICKLY!

Use anything else but Microsoft Word.

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi

There are several possibilities as to the cause of what you are seeing. You
may have to do some investigating to find out how the Greek symbols were
added to the document in the first place.

Possible causes:

* Missing font. My first guess is that your Mac doesn't have the same font
that was used to create the document. Hopefully an OpenType font was used
when the document was created so you can get the same font for your Mac:
http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.html

* UniCode font. MacOS recently began to support UniCode fonts, but Office X
was made before that happened, so it doesn't fully support all of UniCode.
So even if you have the right font it still may appear differently. Requests
to have a future version of Mac Office support UniCode fonts should be sent
to Microsoft using the feedback feature on the help menu.

* MathType. MathType is the full version of Equation Editor. If the document
was created using MathType instead of Equation Editor it might contain some
stuff that's not yet in OSX. MathType is about to come out with a new
version for OSX, but it's not available yet.
http://www.mathtype.com/en/products/mathtype/mac/osx.htm

I hate to be a pessimist, but chances are that you don't have the right
font, and even if you did it still might not display the right character
because Office X doesn't have complete UniCode support at this moment (but
its worth a try - that's the only way you'll find out for sure). Although I
can offer hope for some time in the future, the "quickly" part of your
request may not be possible.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

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Thanks.

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[el]

Many thanks for the quick responses. I sincerely wish I could choose
something other than MSWord. In the meantime, I've just spent 6 hours
re-keying all of the embedded math symbols.

I do use MathType, but it looks like the author used the "Insert
symbol" command instead. The last time I had a similar document, I
saved it as rtf, and it worked fine. Now when I save as rtf, it either
crashes Word, or Word just goes right back to substituting "_"

TextEdit could open the rtf and read the symbols (I assume because it
supports unicode), but I haven't been able to get them back out in any
form that's useful. Ultimately, I'm putting
all of this into FrameMaker, and it didn't like the rtf. I will follow
up with feedback to Microsoft as you suggested.

Thanks again.
Lee

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Jim,

* UniCode font. MacOS recently began to support UniCode fonts, but Office X
was made before that happened, so it doesn't fully support all of UniCode.
So even if you have the right font it still may appear differently. Requests
to have a future version of Mac Office support UniCode fonts should be sent
to Microsoft using the feedback feature on the help menu.

The _ replacing the symbols are a sign (to me) that all the symbol have
been inserted as Unicode in WinWord. The only way out is to use the
symbol font instead r go through the equation editor :-\


Corentin